Light in August (46 page)

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 the 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 dont 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 aint 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 mangrown 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 dont 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 cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that’s why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad. And it wont 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 aint 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 cant, dont dare to,” he says; “it’s because I wont! I wont! do you hear?” He raises his hands from the chair arms. “It’s because I wont do it!” Byron does not move. His hand on the desk top has ceased; he watches the other, thinking   
It aint 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 wont do it! I wont!” 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 of 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.

17

T
hat 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 aint playing——playing——’ He
could not think of the word midwife, which he knew that Hightower would use. ‘I reckon I dont have to think of it,’ he thought. ‘Like a fellow running from or toward a gun aint 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 aint so much upset, after all,’ he thought. Then he thought immediately: ‘No. That aint right. That aint just. Because I dont believe that. I know that the reason he is asleep and I aint asleep is that he is an old man and he cant 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 aint 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.’