Light in August (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 boarding house. 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 cant do anything without getting him mixed up in it, I cant 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 aint,’ he thought. ‘I reckon when a fellow has lived in one room for seven years, he aint going to get moved in one day. Only I reckon that aint 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 aint a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You cant even know your own limits for devilment. Which aint 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 aint got any call to say anything against her,” he said.

“No more I aint. I dont need to. Dont no other woman need to that is going to. I aint saying that it aint been women that has done most of the talking. But if you had more than mansense you would know that women dont mean anything when they talk. It’s menfolks that take talking serious. It aint any woman that believes hard against you and her. Because it aint any woman but knows that she aint had any reason to have to be bad with you, even discounting that baby. Or any other man right now. She never had to. Aint 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 aint 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. Cant 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.”

“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 aint any hard feelings. And then they can get married. That’s about right, aint 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, dont you?”

“Something like that. I reckon I’ll move on.”

“Well, Jefferson’s a good town. But it aint 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 dont 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 aint mine.”

“Sho,” the sheriff said. “It aint yourn.” He was looking at the other’s profile. “What do you aim to do now, Byron?”

“I dont 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 aint nothing in these little towns.”

“Sho. Memphis aint a bad town, for them that like city life. Of course, you aint 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 wont 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 aint going to run so long as he has any hope of getting some of that reward money. And provided he dont know what he is going to meet when he gets there. He dont know that yet.”

“No,” Byron said. “He dont know that. He dont 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 aint 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 clump, 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 wont 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 aint 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. ‘Dont know and dont 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 the 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 cant marry them, because I aint 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 dont 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 dont 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 aint 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 aint keeping you from running,” the deputy said. He paused 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 dont 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, all-embracing 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 aint 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 aint 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.

“When will what be?”

“You know. Like you said. Back home. It was all right for just me. I never minded. But it’s different now. I reckon I got a right to worry now.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “That. Dont you worry about that. Just let me get this here business cleaned up and get my hands on that money. It’s mine by right. There cant nere a bastard one of them—” He stopped. His voice had begun to rise, as though he had forgot where he was and had been thinking aloud. He lowered it; he said: “You just leave it to me. Dont you worry none. I aint never give you no reason yet to worry, have I? Tell me that.”

“No. I never worried. I knowed I could depend on you.”

“Sho you knowed it. And these here bastards—these here—” He had risen from the chair. “Which reminds me—” She neither looked up nor spoke while he stood above her with those eyes harried, desperate, and importunate. It was as if she held him there and that she knew it. And that she released him by her own will, deliberately.

“I reckon you are right busy now, then.”

“For a fact, I am. With all I got to bother me, and them bastards—” She was looking at him now. She watched him as he looked at the window in the rear wall. Then he looked back at the closed door behind him. Then he looked at her, at her grave face which had either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge. He lowered his voice. “I got enemies here. Folks that dont want me to get what I done earned. So I am going to—” Again it was as though she held him, forcing him to, trying him with, that final lie at which even his sorry dregs of pride revolted; held him neither with rods nor cords but with something against which his lying blew trivial as leaves or trash. But she said nothing at all. She just watched him as he went on tiptoe to the window and opened it without a sound. Then he looked at her. Perhaps he thought that he was safe then, that he could get out the window before she could touch him with a physical hand. Or perhaps it was some sorry tagend of shame, as a while ago it had been pride. Because he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit. His voice was not much louder than a whisper: “It’s a man outside. In front, waiting for me.” Then he was gone, through the window, without a sound, in a single motion almost like a long snake. From beyond the window she heard a single faint sound as he began to run. Then only did she move, and then but to sigh once, profoundly.

“Now I got to get up again,” she said, aloud.

When Brown emerges from the woods, onto the railroad right-of-way, he is panting. It is not with fatigue, though the distance which he has covered in the last twenty minutes is almost two miles and the going was not smooth. Rather, it is the snarling and malevolent breathing of a fleeing animal: while he stands looking both ways along the empty track his face, his expression, is that of an animal fleeing alone, desiring no fellowaid, clinging to its solitary dependence upon its own muscles alone and which, in the pause to renew breath, hates every tree and grassblade in sight as if it were a live enemy, hates the very earth it rests upon and the very air it needs to renew breathing.

He has struck the railroad within a few hundred yards of the point at which he aimed. This is the crest of a grade where the northbound freights slow to a terrific and crawling gait of almost less than that of a walking man. A short distance ahead of him the twin bright threads appear to have been cut short off as though with scissors.

For a while he stands just within the screen of woods beside the right-of-way, still hidden. He stands like a man in brooding and desperate calculation, as if he sought in his mind for some last desperate cast in a game already lost. After standing for a moment longer in an attitude of listening, he turns and runs again, through the woods and paralleling the track. He seems to know exactly where he is going; he comes presently upon a path and follows it, still running, and emerges into a clearing in which a negro cabin sits. He approaches the front, walking now. On the porch an old negro woman is sitting, smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth. Brown is not running, but he is breathing fast, heavily. He quiets it to speak. “Hi, Aunty,” he says, “who’s here?”

The old negress removes the pipe. “Ise here. Who wanter know?”

“I got to send a message back to town. In a hurry.” He holds his breathing down to talk. “I’ll pay. Aint there somebody here that can take it?”

“If it’s all that rush, you better tend to it yourself.”

“I’ll pay, I tell you!” he says. He speaks with a kind of raging patience, holding his voice, his breathing, down. “A dollar, if he just goes quick enough. Aint there somebody here that wants to make a dollar? Some of the boys?”

The old woman smokes, watching him. With an aged and inscrutable midnight face she seems to contemplate him with a detachment almost godlike but not at all benign. “A dollar cash?”

He makes a gesture indescribable, of hurry and leashed rage and something like despair. He is about to turn away when the negress speaks again. “Aint nobody here but me and the two little uns. I reckon they’d be too little for you.”

Brown turns back. “How little? I just want somebody that can take a note to the sheriff in a hurry and—”

“The sheriff? Then you come to the wrong place. I aint ghy have none of mine monkeying around no sheriff. I done had one nigger that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He aint never come back, neither. You look somewhere else.”

But Brown is already moving away. He does not run at once. He has not yet thought about running again; for the moment he cannot think at all. His rage and impotence is now almost ecstatic. He seems to muse now upon a sort of timeless and beautiful infallibility in his unpredictable frustrations. As though somehow the very fact that he should be so consistently supplied with them elevates him somehow above the petty human hopes and desires which they abrogate and negative. Hence the negress has to shout twice at him before he hears and turns. She has said nothing, she has not moved: she merely shouted. She says, “Here one will take it for you.”

Standing beside the porch now, materialised apparently from thin air, is a negro who may be either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth. His face is black, still, also quite inscrutable. They stand looking at one another. Or rather, Brown looks at the negro. He cannot tell if the negro is looking at him or not. And that too seems somehow right and fine and in keeping: that his final hope and resort should be a beast that does not appear to have enough ratiocinative power to find the town, let alone any given individual in it. Again Brown makes an indescribable gesture. He is almost running now, back toward the porch, pawing at his shirt pocket. “I want you to take a note to town and bring me back an answer,” he says. “Can you do it?” But he does not listen for a reply. He has taken from his shirt a scrap of soiled paper and a chewed pencil stub, and bending over the edge of the porch, he writes, laborious and hurried, while the negress watches him:

Mr Wat Kenedy Dear sir please give barer My reward Money for captain Murder Xmas rapp it up in Paper 4 given it toe barer yrs truly

He does not sign it. He snatches it up, glaring at it, while the negress watches him. He glares at the dingy and innocent paper, at the labored and hurried pencilling in which he had succeeded for an instant in snaring his whole soul and life too. Then he claps it down and writes not Sined but All rigt You no who and folds it and gives it to the negro. “Take it to the sheriff. Not to nobody else. You reckon you can find him?”

“If the sheriff dont find him first,” the old negress says. “Give it to him. He’ll find him, if he is above ground. Git your dollar and go on, boy.”

The negro had started away. He stops. He just stands there, saying nothing, looking at nothing. On the porch the negress sits, smoking, looking down at the white man’s weak, wolflike face: a face handsome, plausible, but drawn now by a fatigue more than physical, into a spent and vulpine mask. “I thought you was in a hurry,” she says.

“Yes,” Brown says. He takes a coin from his pocket. “Here. And if you bring me back the answer to that inside of an hour. I’ll give you five more like it.”

“Git on, nigger,” the woman says. “You aint got all day. You want the answer brought back here?”

For a moment longer Brown looks at her. Then again caution, shame, all flees from him. “No. Not here. Bring it to the top of the grade yonder. Walk up the track until I call to you. I’ll be watching you all the time too. Dont you forget that. Do you hear?”

“You needn’t to worry,” the negress says. “He’ll git there with it and git back with the answer, if dont nothing stop him. Git on, boy.”

The negro goes on. But something does stop him, before he has gone a half mile. It is another white man, leading a mule.

“Where?” Byron says. “Where did you see him?”

“Just now. Up yon at de house.” The white man goes on, leading the mule. The negro looks after him. He did not show the white man the note because the white man did not ask to see it. Perhaps the reason the white man did not ask to see the note was that the white man did not know that he had a note; perhaps the negro is thinking this, because for a while his face mirrors something terrific and subterraneous. Then it clears. He shouts. The white man turns, halting. “He aint dar now,” the negro shouts. “He say he gwine up ter de railroad grade to wait.”

“Much obliged,” the white man says. The negro goes on.

Brown returned to the track. He was not running now. He was saying to himself, ‘He wont do it. He cant do it. I know he cant find him, cant get it, bring it back.’ He called no names, thought no names. It seemed to him now that they were all just shapes like chessmen—the negro, the sheriff, the money, all—unpredictable and without reason moved here and there by an Opponent who could read his moves before he made them and who created spontaneous rules which he and not the Opponent, must follow. He was for the time being even beyond despair as he turned from the rails and entered the underbrush near the crest of the grade. He moved now without haste, gauging his distance as though there were nothing else in the world or in his life at least, save that. He chose his place and sat down, hidden from the track but where he himself could see it.

‘Only I know he wont do it,’ he thinks. ‘I dont even expect it. If I was to see him coming back with the money in his hand, I would not believe it. It wouldn’t be for me. I would know that. I would know that it was a mistake. I would say to him You go on. You are looking for somebody else beside me. You aint looking for Lucas Burch. No, sir, Lucas Burch dont deserve that money, that reward. He never done nothing to get it. No, sir’ He begins to laugh, squatting, motionless, his spent face bent, laughing. ‘Yes, sir. All Lucas Burch wanted was justice. Just justice. Not that he told them bastards the murderer’s name and where to find him only they wouldn’t try. They never tried because they would have had to give Lucas Burch the money. Justice.’ Then he says aloud, in a harsh, tearful voice: “Justice. That was all. Just my rights. And them bastards with their little tin stars, all sworn everyone of them on oath, to protect a American citizen.” He says it harshly, almost crying with rage and despair and fatigue: “I be dog if it aint enough to make a man turn downright bowlsheyvick.” Thus he hears no sound at all until Byron speaks directly behind him:

“Get up onto your feet.”

It does not last long. Byron knew that it was not going to. But he did not hesitate. He just crept up until he could see the other, where he stopped, looking at the crouching and unwarned figure. ‘You’re bigger than me,’ Byron thought. ‘But I dont care. You’ve had every other advantage of me. And I dont care about that neither. You’ve done throwed away twice inside of nine months what I aint had in thirtyfive years. And now I’m going to get the hell beat out of me and I dont care about that, neither.’

It does not last long. Brown, whirling, takes advantage of his astonishment even. He did not believe that any man, catching his enemy sitting, would give him a chance to get on his feet, even if the enemy were not the larger of the two. He would not have done it himself. And the fact that the smaller man did do it when he would not have, was worse than insult: it was ridicule. So he fought with even a more savage fury than he would have if Byron had sprung upon his back without warning: with the blind and desperate valor of a starved and cornered rat he fought.

It lasted less than two minutes. Then Byron was lying quietly among the broken and trampled undergrowth, bleeding quietly about the face, hearing the underbrush crashing on, ceasing, fading into silence. Then he is alone. He feels no particular pain now, but better than that, he feels no haste, no urgency, to do anything or go anywhere. He just lies bleeding and quiet, knowing that after a while will be time enough to reenter the world and time.

He does not even wonder where Brown has gone. He does not have to think about Brown now. Again his mind is filled with still shapes like discarded and fragmentary toys of childhood piled indiscriminate and gathering quiet dust in a forgotten closet—Brown. Lena Grove. Hightower. Byron Bunch—all like small objects which had never been alive, which he had played with in childhood and then broken and forgot. He is lying so when he hears the train whistle for a crossing a half mile away.

This rouses him; this is the world and time too. He sits up, slowly, tentatively. ‘Anyway, I aint broke anything,’ he thinks. ‘I mean, he aint broke anything that belongs to me.’ It is getting late: it is time now, with distance, moving, in it. ‘Yes. I’ll have to be moving. I’ll have to get on so I can find me something else to meddle with.’ The train is coming nearer. Already the stroke of the engine has shortened and become heavier as it begins to feel the grade; presently he can see the smoke. He seeks in his pocket for a handkerchief. He has none, so he tears the tail from his shirt and dabs at his face gingerly, listening to the short, blasting reports of the locomotive exhaust just over the grade. He moves to the edge of the undergrowth, where he can see the track. The engine is in sight now, almost headon to him beneath the spaced, heavy blasts of black smoke. It has an effect of terrific nomotion. Yet it does move, creeping terrifically up and over the crest of the grade. Standing now in the fringe of bushes he watches the engine approach and pass him, laboring, crawling, with the rapt and boylike absorption (and perhaps yearning) of his country raising. It passes; his eye moves on, watching the cars as they in turn crawl up and over the crest, when for the second time that afternoon he sees a man materialise apparently out of air, in the act of running.

Even then he does not realise what Brown is about. He has progressed too far into peace and solitude to wonder. He just stands there and watches Brown run to the train, stooping, fleeing, and grasp the iron ladder at the end of a car and leap upward and vanish from sight as though sucked into a vacuum. The train is beginning to increase its speed; he watches the approach of the car where Brown vanished. It passes; clinging to the rear of it, between it and the next car, Brown stands, his face leaned out and watching the bushes. They see one another at the same moment: the two faces, the mild, nondescript, bloody one and the lean, harried, desperate one contorted now in a soundless shouting above the noise of the train, passing one another as though on opposite orbits and with an effect as of phantoms or apparitions. Still Byron is not thinking. “Great God in the mountain,” he says, with childlike and almost ecstatic astonishment; “he sho knows how to jump a train. He’s sho done that before.” He is not thinking at all. It is as though the moving wall of dingy cars were a dyke beyond which the world, time, hope unbelievable and certainty incontrovertible, waited, giving him yet a little more of peace. Anyway, when the last car passes, moving fast now, the world rushes down on him like a flood, a tidal wave.

It is too huge and fast for distance and time; hence no path to be retraced, leading the mule for a good way before he remembers to get on it and ride. It is as though he has already and long since outstripped himself, already waiting at the cabin until he can catch up and enter. And then I will stand there and I will . . . He tries it again: Then I will stand there and I will . . . But he can get no further than that. He is in the road again now, approaching a wagon homeward bound from town. It is about six o’clock. He does not give up, however. Even if I cant seem to get any further than that: when I will open the door and come in and stand there. And then I will. Look at her. Look at her. Look at her— The voice speaks again:

“—excitement, I reckon.”

“What?” Byron says. The wagon has halted. He is right beside it, the mule stopped too. On the wagon seat the man speaks again, in his flat, complaining voice:

“Durn the luck. Just when I had to get started for home. I’m already late.”

“Excitement?” Byron says. “What excitement?”

The man is looking at him. “From your face, a man would say you had been in some excitement yourself.”

“I fell down,” Byron says. “What excitement in town this evening?”

“I thought maybe you hadn’t heard. About an hour ago. That nigger, Christmas. They killed him.”