Light in August (2 page)

She slept in a leanto room at the back of the house. It had a window which she learned to open and close again in the dark without making a sound, even though there also slept in the leanto room at first her oldest nephew and then the two oldest and then the three. She had lived there eight years before she opened the window for the first time. She
had not opened it a dozen times hardly before she discovered that she should not have opened it at all. She said to herself, ‘That’s just my luck.’

The sister-in-law told the brother. Then he remarked her changing shape, which he should have noticed some time before. He was a hard man. Softness and gentleness and youth (he was just forty) and almost everything else except a kind of stubborn and despairing fortitude and the bleak heritage of his bloodpride had been sweated out of him. He called her whore. He accused the right man (young bachelors, or sawdust Casanovas anyway, were even fewer in number than families) but she would not admit it, though the man had departed six months ago. She just repeated stubbornly, “He’s going to send for me. He said he would send for me”; unshakable, sheeplike, having drawn upon that reserve of patient and steadfast fidelity upon which the Lucas Burches depend and trust, even though they do not intend to be present when the need for it arises. Two weeks later she climbed again through the window. It was a little difficult, this time. ‘If it had been this hard to do before, I reckon I would not be doing it now,’ she thought. She could have departed by the door, by daylight. Nobody would have stopped her. Perhaps she knew that. But she chose to go by night, and through the window. She carried a palm leaf fan and a small bundle tied neatly in a bandanna handkerchief. It contained among other things thirtyfive cents in nickels and dimes. Her shoes were a pair of his own which her brother had given to her. They were but slightly worn, since in the summer neither of them wore shoes at all. When she
felt the dust of the road beneath her feet she removed the shoes and carried them in her hand.

She has been doing that now for almost four weeks. Behind her the four weeks, the evocation of
far
is a peaceful corridor paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and peopled with kind and nameless faces and voices:   
Lucas Burch? I dont know. I dont know of anybody by that name around here. This road? It goes to Pocahontas. He might be there. It’s possible. Here’s a wagon that’s going a piece of the way. It will take you that far;
   backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.

The wagon mounts the hill toward her. She passed it about a mile back down the road. It was standing beside the road, the mules asleep in the traces and their heads pointed in the direction in which she walked. She saw it and she saw the two men squatting beside a barn beyond the fence. She looked at the wagon and the men once: a single glance allembracing, swift, innocent arid profound. She did not stop; very likely the men beyond the fence had not seen her even look at the wagon nor at them. Neither did she look back. She went on out of sight, walking slowly, the shoes unlaced about her ankles, until she reached the top of the hill a mile beyond. Then she sat down on the ditchbank, with her feet in the shallow ditch, and removed the shoes. After a while
she began to hear the wagon. She heard it for some time. Then it came into sight, mounting the hill.

The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewiney silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ‘That far within my hearing before my seeing,’ Lena thinks. She thinks of herself as already moving, riding again, thinking   
Then it will be as if I were riding for a half mile before I even got into the wagon, before the wagon even got to where I was waiting, and that when the wagon is empty of me again it will go on for a half mile with me still in it
   She waits, not even watching the wagon now, while thinking goes idle and swift and smooth, filled with nameless kind faces and voices:   
Lucas Burch? You say you tried in Pocahontas? This road? It goes to Springvale. You wait here. There will be a wagon passing soon that will take you as far as it goes
   Thinking, ‘And if he is going all the way to Jefferson,
I will be riding within the hearing of Lucas Burch before his seeing. He will hear the wagon, but he wont know. So there will be one within his hearing before his seeing. And then he will see me and he will be excited. And so there will be two within his seeing before his remembering.’

While Armstid and Winterbottom were squatting against the shady wall of Winterbottom’s stable, they saw her pass in the road. They saw at once that she was young, pregnant, and a stranger. “I wonder where she got that belly,” Winterbottom said.

“I wonder how far she has brought it afoot,” Armstid said.

“Visiting somebody back down the road, I reckon,” Winterbottom said.

“I reckon not. Or I would have heard. And it aint nobody up my way, neither. I would have heard that, too.”

“I reckon she knows where she is going,” Winterbottom said. “She walks like it.”

“She’ll have company, before she goes much further,” Armstid said. The woman had now gone on, slowly, with her swelling and unmistakable burden. Neither of them had seen her so much as glance at them when she passed in a shapeless garment of faded blue, carrying a palm leaf fan and a small cloth bundle. “She aint come from nowhere close,” Armstid said. “She’s hitting that lick like she’s been at it for a right smart while and had a right smart piece to go yet.”

“She must be visiting around here somewhere,” Winterbottom said.

“I reckon I would have heard about it,” Armstid said. The woman went on. She had not looked back. She went out of sight up the road: swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself. She walked out of their talking too; perhaps out of their minds too. Because after a while Armstid said what he had come to say. He had already made two previous trips, coming in his wagon five miles and squatting and spitting for three hours beneath the shady wall of Winterbottom’s barn with the timeless unhaste and indirection of his kind, in order to say it. It was to make Winterbottom an offer for a cultivator which Winterbottom wanted to sell. At last Armstid looked at the sun and offered the price which he had decided to offer while lying in bed three nights ago. “I know of one in Jefferson I can buy at that figure,” he said.

“I reckon you better buy it,” Winterbottom said. “It sounds like a bargain.”

“Sho,” Armstid said. He spat. He looked again at the sun, and rose. “Well, I reckon I better get on toward home.”

He got into his wagon and waked the mules. That is, he put them into motion, since only a negro can tell when a mule is asleep or awake. Winterbottom followed him to the fence, leaning his arms on the top rail. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’d sho buy that cultivator at that figure. If you dont take it, I be dog if I aint a good mind to buy it, myself, at that price. I reckon the fellow that owns it aint got a span of mules to sell for about five dollars, has he?”

“Sho,” Armstid said. He drove on, the wagon beginning to fall into its slow and mileconsuming clatter. Neither does
he look back. Apparently he is not looking ahead either, because he does not see the woman sitting in the ditch beside the road until the wagon has almost reached the top of the hill. In the instant in which he recognises the blue dress he cannot tell if she has ever seen the wagon at all. And no one could have known that he had ever looked at her either as, without any semblance of progress in either of them, they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically toward her in its slow palpable aura of somnolence and red dust in which the steady feet of the mules move dreamlike and punctuate by the sparse jingle of harness and the limber bobbing of jackrabbit ears, the mules still neither asleep nor awake as he halts them.

From beneath a sunbonnet of faded blue, weathered now by other than formal soap and water, she looks up at him quietly and pleasantly: young, pleasantfaced, candid, friendly, and alert. She does not move yet. Beneath the faded garment of that same weathered blue her body is shapeless and immobile. The fan and the bundle lie on her lap. She wears no stockings. Her bare feet rest side by side in the shallow ditch. The pair of dusty, heavy, manlooking shoes beside them are not more inert. In the halted wagon Armstid sits, humped, bleacheyed. He sees that the rim of the fan is bound neatly in the same faded blue as the sunbonnet and the dress.

“How far you going?” he says.

“I was trying to get up the road a pieceways before dark,” she says. She rises and takes up the shoes. She climbs slowly and deliberately into the road, approaching the wagon. Armstid does not descend to help her. He merely
holds the team still while she climbs heavily over the wheel and sets the shoes beneath the seat. Then the wagon moves on. “I thank you,” she says. “It was right tiring afoot.”

Apparently Armstid has never once looked full at her. Yet he has already seen that she wears no wedding ring. He does not look at her now. Again the wagon settles into its slow clatter. “How far you come from?” he says.

She expels her breath. It is not a sigh so much as a peaceful expiration, as though of peaceful astonishment. “A right good piece, it seems now. I come from Alabama.”

“Alabama? In your shape? Where’s your folks?”

She does not look at him, either. “I’m looking to meet him up this way. You might know him. His name is Lucas Burch. They told me back yonder a ways that he is in Jefferson, working for the planing mill.”

“Lucas Burch.” Armstid’s tone is almost identical with hers. They sit side by side on the sagging and brokenspringed seat. He can see her hands upon her lap and her profile beneath the sunbonnet; from the corner of his eye he sees it. She seems to be watching the road as it unrolls between the limber ears of the mules. “And you come all the way here, afoot, by yourself, hunting for him?”

She does not answer for a moment. Then she says: “Folks have been kind. They have been right kind.”

“Womenfolks too?” From the corner of his eye he watches her profile, thinking   
I dont know what Martha’s going to say
   thinking, ‘I reckon I do know what Martha’s going to say. I reckon womenfolks are likely to be good without being very kind. Men, now, might. But it’s only a bad woman herself that is likely to be very kind to another
woman that needs the kindness’ thinking   
Yes I do. I know exactly what Martha is going to say

She sits a little forward, quite still, her profile quite still, her cheek. “It’s a strange thing,” she says.

“How folks can look at a strange young gal walking the road in your shape and know that her husband has left her?” She does not move. The wagon now has a kind of rhythm, its ungreased and outraged wood one with the slow afternoon, the road, the heat. “And you aim to find him up here.”

She does not move, apparently watching the slow road between the ears of the mules, the distance perhaps road-carved and definite. “I reckon I’ll find him. It wont be hard. He’ll be where the most folks are gathered together, and the laughing and joking is. He always was a hand for that.”

Armstid grunts, a sound savage, brusque. “Get up, mules,” he says; he says to himself, between thinking and saying aloud: ‘I reckon she will. I reckon that fellow is fixing to find that he made a bad mistake when he stopped this side of Arkansas, or even Texas.’

The sun is slanting, an hour above the horizon now, above the swift coming of the summer night. The lane turns from the road, quieter even than the road. “Here we are,” Armstid says.

The woman moves at once. She reaches down and finds the shoes; apparently she is not even going to delay the wagon long enough to put them on. “I thank you kindly,” she says. “It was a help.”

The wagon is halted again. The woman is preparing to descend. “Even if you get to Varner’s store before sundown, you’ll still be twelve miles from Jefferson,” Armstid says.

She holds the shoes, the bundle, the fan awkwardly in one hand, the other free to help her down. “I reckon I better get on,” she says.