“Yessum. I reckon so.”
“And they believed for a while that he helped do it. And so they will give him that thousand dollars to show it ain’t any hard feelings. And then they can get married. That’s about right, ain’t it?”
“Yessum.” He, could feel her watching him, not unkindly.
“And so I reckon you’ll be leaving us. I reckon you kind of feel like you have wore out Jefferson, don’t you?”
“Something like that. I reckon I’ll move on.”
“Well, Jefferson’s a good town. But it ain’t so good but what a footloose man like you can find in another one enough devilment and trouble to keep him occupied too. ... You can leave your grip here until you are ready for it, if you want.”
He waited until noon and after. He waited until he believed that the sheriff had finished his dinner. Then he went to the sheriff’s home. He would not come in. He waited at the door until the sheriff came out—the fat man, with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face. They went aside, into the shade of a tree in the yard. There was no seat there; neither did they squat on their heels, as by ordinary (they were both countrybred) they would have done. The sheriff listened quietly to the man, the quiet little man who for seven years had been a minor mystery to the town and who had been for seven days wellnigh a public outrage and affront.
“I see,” the sheriff said. “You think the time has come to get them married.”
“I don’t know. That’s his business and hers. I reckon he better go out and see her, though. I reckon now is the time for that. You can send a deputy with him. I told her he would come out there this evening. What they do then is her business and hisn. It ain’t mine.”
“Sho,” the sheriff. said. “It ain’t yourn.” He was looking at the other’s profile. “What do you aim to do now, Byron?”
“I don’t know.” His foot moved slowly upon the earth; he was watching it. “I been thinking about going up to Memphis. Been thinking about it for a couple of years. I might do that. There ain’t nothing in these little towns.”
“Sho. Memphis ain’t a bad town, for them that like city life. Of course, you ain’t got any family to have to drag around and hamper you. I reckon if I had been a single man ten years ago I’d have done that too. Been better off, maybe. You’re figuring on leaving right away, I reckon.”
“Soon, I reckon.” He looked up, then down again. He said: “I quit out at the mill this morning.”
“Sho,” the sheriff said. “I figured you hadn’t walked all the way in since twelve and aimed to get back out there by one o’clock. Well, it looks like—” He ceased. He knew that by night the Grand Jury would have indicted Christmas, and Brown—or Burch—would be a free agent save for his bond to appear as a witness at next month’s court. But even his presence would not be absolutely essential, since Christmas had made no denial and the sheriff believed that he would plead guilty in order to save his neck. ‘And it won’t do no harm, anyway, to throw the scare of God into that durn fellow, once in his life,’ he thought. He said: “I reckon that can be fixed. Of course, like you say, I will have to send a deputy with him. Even if he ain’t going to run so long as he has any hope of getting some of that reward money. And provided he don’t know what he is going to meet when he gets there. He don’t know that yet.”
“No,” Byron said. “He don’t know that. He don’t know that she is in Jefferson.”
“So I reckon I’ll just send him out there with a deputy. Not tell him why: just send him out there. Unless you want to take him yourself.”
“No,” Byron said. “No. No.” But he did not move.
“I’ll just do that. You’ll be gone by that time, I reckon. I’ll just send a deputy with him. Will four o’clock do?”
“It’ll be fine. It’ll be kind of you. It’ll be a kindness.”
“Sho. Lots of folks beside me has been good to her since she come to Jefferson. Well, I ain’t going to say goodbye. I reckon Jefferson will see you again someday. Never knowed a man yet to live here a while and then leave it for good. Except maybe that fellow in the jail yonder. But he’ll plead guilty, I reckon. Save his neck. Take it out of Jefferson though, anyway. It’s right hard on that old lady that thinks she is his grandmother. The old man was downtown when I come home, hollering and ranting, calling folks cowards because they wouldn’t take him out of jail right then and there and lynch him.” He began to chuckle, heavily. “He better be careful, or Percy Grimm’ll get him with that army of his.” He sobered. “It’s right hard on her. On women.” He looked at Byron’s profile. “It’s been right hard on a lot of us. Well, you come back some day soon. Maybe Jefferson will treat you better next time.”
At four o’clock that afternoon, hidden, he sees the car come up and stop, and the deputy and the man whom he knew by the name of Brown get out and approach the cabin. Brown is not handcuffed now, and Byron watches them reach the cabin and sees the deputy push Brown forward and into the door. Then the door closes behind Brown, and the deputy sits on the step and takes a sack of tobacco from his pocket. Byron rises to his feet. ‘I can go now,’ he thinks. ‘Now I can go.’ His hiding place is a clump of shrubbery on the lawn where the house once stood. On the opposite side of the dump, hidden from the cabin and the road both, the mule is tethered. Lashed behind the worn saddle is a battered yellow suitcase which is not leather. He mounts the mule and turns it into the road. He does not look back.
The mild red road goes on beneath the slanting and peaceful afternoon, mounting a hill. ‘Well, I can bear a hill,’ he thinks. ‘I can bear a hill, a man can.’ It is peaceful and still, familiar with seven years. ‘It seems like a man can just about bear anything. He can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn’t do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking back won’t do him any good.’
The hill rises, cresting. He has never seen the sea, and so he thinks. ‘It is like the edge of nothing. Like once I passed it I would just ride right off into nothing. Where trees would look like and be called by something else except trees, and men would look like and be called by something else except folks. And Byron Bunch he wouldn’t even have to be or not be Byron Bunch. Byron Bunch and his mule not anything with falling fast, until they would take fire like the Reverend Hightower says about them rocks running so fast in space that they take fire and burn up and there ain’t even a cinder to have to hit the ground.’
But then from beyond the hill crest there begins to rise that which he knows is there: the trees which are trees, the terrific and tedious distance which, being moved by blood, he must compass forever and ever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth. Steadily they rise, not portentous, not threatful. That’s it. They are oblivious of him. ‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ he thinks. ‘Like they were saying All right. You say you suffer. All right. But in the first place, all we got is your naked word for it. And in the second place, you just say that you are Byron Bunch. And in the third place, you are just the one that calls yourself Byron Bunch today, now, this minute. ... ‘Well,’ he thinks, ‘if that’s all it is, I reckon I might as well have the pleasure of not being able to bear looking back too.’ He halts the mule and turns in the saddle.
He did not realise that he has come so far and that the crest is so high. Like a shallow bowl the once broad domain of what was seventy years ago a plantation house lies beneath him, between him and the opposite ridge upon which is Jefferson. But the plantation is broken now by random negro cabins and garden patches and dead fields erosion gutted and choked with blackjack and sassafras and persimmon and brier. But in the exact center the clump of oaks still stand as they stood when the house was built, though now there is no house among them. From here he cannot even see the scars of the fire; he could not even tell where. it used to stand if it were not for the oaks and t
he position of the ruined stable and the cabin beyond, the cabin toward which he is looking. It stands full and quiet in the afternoon sun, almost toylike; like a toy the deputy sits on the step. Then, as Byron watches, a man appears as though by magic at the rear of it, already running, in the act of running out from the rear of the cabin while the unsuspecting deputy sits quiet and motionless on the front step. For a while longer Byron too sits motionless, half turned in the saddle, and watches the tiny figure flee on across the barren slope behind the cabin, toward the woods.
Then a cold, hard wind seems to blow through him. It is at once violent and peaceful, blowing hard away like chaff or trash or dead leaves all the desire and the despair and the hopelessness and the tragic and vain imagining too. With the very blast of it he seems to feel himself rush back and empty again, without anything in him now which had not been there two weeks ago, before he ever saw her. The desire of this moment is more than desire: it is conviction quiet and assured; before he is aware that his brain has telegraphed his hand he has turned the mule from the road and is galloping along the ridge which parallels the running man’s course when he entered the woods. He has not even named the man’s name to himself. He does not speculate at all upon where the man is going, and why. It does not once enter his head that Brown is fleeing again, as he himself had predicted. If he thought about it at all, he probably believed that Brown was engaged, after his own peculiar fashion, in some thoroughly legitimate business having to do with his and Lena’s departure. But he was not thinking about that at all; he was not thinking about Lena at all; she was as completely out of his mind as if he had never seen her face nor heard her name. He is thinking: ‘I took care of his woman for him and I borned his child for him. And now there is one more thing I can do for him. I can’t marry them, because I ain’t a minister. And I may not can catch him, because he’s got a start on me. And I may not can whip him if I do, because he is bigger than me. But I can try it. I can try to do it.’
When the deputy called for him at the jail, Brown asked at once where they were going. Visiting, the deputy told him. Brown held back, watching the deputy with his handsome, spuriously bold face. “I don’t want to visit nobody here. I’m a stranger here.”
“You’d be strange anywhere you was at,” the deputy said. “Even at home. Come on.”
“I’m a American citizen,” Brown said. “I reckon I got my rights, even if I don’t wear no tin star on my galluses.”
“Sho,” the deputy said. “That’s what I am doing now: helping you get your rights.”
Brown’s face lighted: it was a flash. “Have they— Are they going to pay—”
“That reward? Sho. I’m going to take you to the place myself right now, where if you are going to get any reward, you’ll get it.”
Brown sobered. But he moved, though he still watched the deputy suspiciously. “This here is a funny way to go about it,” he said. “Keeping me shut up in jail while them bastards tries to beat me out of it.”
“I reckon the bastard ain’t been whelped yet that can beat you at anything,” the deputy said. “Come on. They’re waiting on us.”
They emerged from the jail. In the sunlight Brown blinked, looking this way and that, then he jerked his head up, looking back over his shoulder with that horselike movement. The car was waiting at the curb. Brown looked at the car and then at the deputy, quite sober, quite wary. “Where are we going in a car?” he said. “It wasn’t too far for me to walk to the courthouse this morning.”
“Watt sent the car to help bring back the reward in,” the deputy said. “Get in.”
Brown grunted. “He’s done got mighty particular about my comfort all of a sudden. A car to ride in, and no handcuffs. And. just one durn fellow to keep me from running away.”
“I ain’t keeping you from running,” the deputy said. He used in the act of starting the car. “You want to run now?”
Brown looked at him, glaring, sullen, outraged, suspicious. “I see,” he said. “That’s his trick. Trick me into running and then collect that thousand dollars himself. How much of it did he promise you?”
“Me? I’m going to get the same as you, to a cent.”
For a moment longer Brown glared at the deputy. He cursed, pointless, in a weak, violent way. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go if we are going.”
They drove out to the scene of the fire and the murder. At steady, almost timed intervals Brown jerked his head up and back with that movement of a free mule running in front of a car in a narrow road. “What are we going out here for?”
“To get your reward,” the deputy said.
“Where am I going to get it?”
“In that cabin yonder. It’s waiting for you there.”
Brown looked about, at the blackened embers which had once been a house, at the blank cabin in which he had lived for four months sitting weathered and quiet in the sunlight. His face was quite grave, quite alert. “There’s something funny about this. If Kennedy thinks he can tromple on my rights, just because he wears a durn little tin star …”
“Get on,” the deputy said. “If you don’t like the reward, I’ll be waiting to take you back to jail any time you want. Just any time you want.” He pushed Brown on, opening the cabin door and pushing him into it and closing the door behind him and sitting on the step.
Brown heard the door close behind him. He was still moving forward. Then, in the midst of one of those quick, jerking, allembracing looks, as if his eyes could not wait to take in the room, he stopped dead still. Lena on the cot watched the white scar beside his mouth vanish completely, as if the ebb of blood behind it had snatched the scar in passing like a rag from a clothesline. She did not speak at all. She just lay there, propped on the pillows, watching him with her sober eyes in which there was nothing at all—joy, surprise, reproach, love—while over his face passed shock, astonishment, outrage, and then downright terror, each one mocking in turn at the telltale little white scar, while ceaselessly here and there about the empty room went his harried and desperate eyes. She watched him herd them by will, like two terrified beasts, and drive them up to meet her own. “Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well. It’s Lena.” She watched him, holding his eyes up to hers like two beasts about to break, as if he knew that when they broke this time he would never catch them, turn them again, and that he himself would be lost. She could almost watch his mind casting this way and that, ceaseless, harried, terrified, seeking words which his voice, his tongue, could speak. “If it ain’t Lena. Yes, sir. So you got my message. Soon as I got here I sent you a message last month as soon as I got settled down and I thought it had got lost—It was a fellow I didn’t know what his name was but he said he would take— He didn’t look reliable but I had to trust him but I thought when I gave him the ten dollars for you to travel on that he …” His voice died somewhere behind his desperate eyes. Yet still she could watch his mind darting and darting as without pity, without anything at all, she watched him with her grave, unwinking, unbearable gaze, watched him fumble and flee and tack until at last all that remained in him of pride, of what sorry pride the desire for justification was, fled from him and left him naked. Then for the first time she spoke. Her voice was quiet, unruffled, cool.
“Come over here,” she said. “Come on. I ain’t going to let him bite you.” When he moved he approached on tiptoe. She saw that, though she was now no longer watching him. She knew that just as she knew that he was now standing with a kind of clumsy and diffident awe above her and the sleeping child. But she knew that it was not at and because of the child. She knew that in that sense he had not even seen the child She could still see, feel, his mind darting and darting. He is going to make out like he was not afraid she thought. He will have no more shame than to lie about being afraid, just as he had no more shame than to be afraid because he lied.
“Well, well,” he said. “So there it is, sho enough.”
“Yes,” she said. “Will you set down?” The chair which Hightower
had drawn up was still beside the cot. He had already remarked it. She had it all ready for me he thought. Again he cursed, soundless, badgered, furious. Them bastards. Them bastards But his face was quite smooth when he sat down.
“Yes, sir. Here we are again. Same as I had planned it. I would have had it all fixed up ready for you, only I have been so busy lately. Which reminds me—” Again he made that abrupt, mulelike, backlooking movement of the head. She was not looking at him. She said
“There is a preacher here. That has already come to see me.”
“That’s fine,” he said. His voice was loud, hearty. Yet the heartiness, like the timbre, seemed to be as impermanent as the sound of the words, vanishing, leaving nothing, not even a definitely stated thought in the ear or the belief. “That’s just fine. Soon as I get caught up with all this business—” He jerked his arm in a gesture vague, embracing, looking at her. His face was smooth and blank. His eyes were bland, alert, secret, yet behind them there lurked still that quality harried and desperate. But she was not looking at him.
“What kind of work are you doing now? At the planing mill?”
He watched her. “No. I quit that.” His eyes watched her. It was as though they were not his eyes, had no relation to the rest of him, what he did and what he said. “Slaving like a durn nigger ten hours a day. I got something on the string now that means money. Not no little piddling fifteen cents a hour. And when I get it, soon as I get a few little details cleared up, then you and me will …” Hard, intent, secret, the eyes watched her, her lowered face in profile. Again she heard that faint, abrupt sound as he jerked his head up and back. “And that reminds me—”
She had not moved. She said: “When will it be, Lucas?” Then she could hear, feel, utter stillness, utter silence.
Light in August Page 36
