Light in August (4 page)

“What are you fixing to do with your eggmoney this time of night?” he says.

“I reckon it’s mine to do with what I like.” She stoops into the lamp, her face harsh, bitter. “God knows it was me sweated over them and nursed them. You never lifted no hand.”

“Sho,” he says. “I reckon it aint any human in this country is going to dispute them hens with you, lessen it’s the possums and the snakes. That rooster bank, neither,” he says. Because, stooping suddenly, she jerks off one shoe and strikes the china bank a single shattering blow. From the bed, reclining, Armstid watches her gather the remaining coins from among the china fragments and drop them with the others into the sack and knot it and reknot it three or four times with savage finality.

“You give that to her,” she says. “And come sunup you hitch up the team and take her away from here. Take her all the way to Jefferson, if you want.”

“I reckon she can get a ride in from Varner’s store,” he says.

Mrs Armstid rose before day and cooked breakfast. It was on the table when Armstid came in from milking. “Go tell her to come and eat,” Mrs Armstid said. When he and Lena returned to the kitchen, Mrs Armstid was not there. Lena looked about the room once, pausing at the door with less than a pause, her face already fixed in an expression immanent with smiling, with speech, prepared speech, Armstid knew. But she said nothing; the pause was less than a pause.

“Let’s eat and get on,” Armstid said. “You still got a right
good piece to go.” He watched her eat, again with the tranquil and hearty decorum of last night’s supper, though there was now corrupting it a quality of polite and almost finicking restraint. Then he gave her the knotted cloth sack. She took it, her face pleased, warm, though not very much surprised.

“Why, it’s right kind of her,” she said. “But I wont need it. I’m so nigh there now.”

“I reckon you better keep it. I reckon you done noticed how Martha aint much on being crossed in what she aims to do.”

“It’s right kind,” Lena said. She tied the money up in the bandanna bundle and put on the sunbonnet. The wagon was waiting. When they drove down the lane, past the house, she looked back at it. “It was right kind of you all,” she said.

“She done it,” Armstid said. “I reckon I cant claim no credit.”

“It was right kind, anyway. You’ll have to say goodbye to her for me. I had hopened to see her myself, but…….”

“Sho,” Armstid said. “I reckon she was busy or something. I’ll tell her.”

They drove up to the store in the early sunlight, with the squatting men already spitting across the heelgnawed porch, watching her descend slowly and carefully from the wagon seat, carrying the bundle and the fan. Again Armstid did not move to assist her. He said from the seat: “This here is Miz Burch. She wants to go to Jefferson. If anybody is going in today, she will take it kind to ride with them.”

She reached the earth, in the heavy, dusty shoes. She
looked up at him, serene, peaceful. “It’s been right kind,” she said.

“Sho,” Armstid said. “I reckon you can get to town now.” He looked down at her. Then it seemed an interminable while that he watched his tongue seek words, thinking quiet and swift, thought fleeing   
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he wont fail to see a chance to meddle
   Then his tongue found words, he listening, perhaps with the same astonishment that she did: “Only I wouldn’t set too much store by…….store in …” thinking   
She is not listening. If she could hear words like that she would not be getting down from this wagon, with that belly and that fan and that little bundle, alone, bound for a place she never saw before and hunting for a man she aint going to ever see again and that she has already seen one time too many as it is
   “—any time you are passing back this way, tomorrow or even tonight…….”

“I reckon I’ll be all right now,” she said. “They told me he is there.”

He turned the wagon and drove back home, sitting hunched, bleacheyed, on the sagging seat, thinking, ‘It wouldn’t have done any good. She would not have believed the telling and hearing it any more than she will believe the thinking that’s been going on all around her for……. It’s four weeks now, she said. No more than she will feel it and believe it now. Setting there on that top step, with her hands in her lap and them fellows squatting there and spitting past her into the road. And not even waiting for them to ask her
about it before she begins to tell. Telling them of her own accord about that durn fellow like she never had nothing particular to either hide or tell, even when Jody Varner or some of them will tell her that that fellow in Jefferson at the planing mill is named Bunch and not Burch; and that not worrying her either. I reckon she knows more than even Martha does, like when she told Martha last night about how the Lord will see that what is right will get done.’

It required only one or two questions. Then, sitting on the top step, the fan and the bundle upon her lap, Lena tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child, the squatting overalled men listening quietly.

“That fellow’s name is Bunch,” Varner says. “He’s been working there at the mill about seven years. How do you know that Burch is there too?”

She is looking away up the road, in the direction of Jefferson. Her face is calm, waiting, a little detached without being bemused. “I reckon he’ll be there. At that planing mill and all. Lucas always did like excitement. He never did like to live quiet. That’s why it never suited him back at Doane’s Mill. Why he—we decided to make a change: for money and excitement.”

“For money and excitement,” Varner says. “Lucas aint the first young buck that’s throwed over what he was bred to do and them that depended on him doing it, for money and excitement.”

But she is not listening apparently. She sits quietly on the top step, watching the road where it curves away, empty and mounting, toward Jefferson. The squatting men along the wall look at her still and placid face and they think as Armstid thought and as Varner thinks: that she is thinking of a scoundrel who deserted her in trouble and whom they believe that she will never see again, save his coattails perhaps already boardflat with running. ‘Or maybe it’s about that Sloane’s or Bone’s Mill she is thinking,’ Varner thinks. ‘I reckon that even a fool gal dont have to come as far as Mississippi to find out that whatever place she run from aint going to be a whole lot different or worse than the place she is at. Even if it has got a brother in it that objects to his sister’s nightprowling’ thinking   
I would have done the same as the brother; the father would have done the same. She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits

She is not thinking about this at all. She is thinking about the coins knotted in the bundle beneath her hands. She is remembering breakfast, thinking how she can enter the store this moment and buy cheese and crackers and even sardines if she likes. At Armstid’s she had had but a cup of coffee and a piece of cornbread: nothing more, though Armstid pressed her. ‘I et polite,’ she thinks, her hands lying upon the bundle, knowing the hidden coins, remembering the single cup of coffee, the decorous morsel of strange bread; thinking with a sort of serene pride: ‘Like a lady I et. Like a lady travelling. But now I can buy sardines too if I should so wish.’

So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing
that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives. This time she conquers. She rises and walking a little awkwardly, a little carefully, she traverses the ranked battery of maneyes and enters the store, the clerk following. ‘I’m a-going to do it,’ she thinks, even while ordering the cheese and crackers; ‘I’m a-going to do it’, saying aloud: “And a box of sardines.” She calls them
sour-deens
. “A nickel box.”

“We aint got no nickel sardines,” the clerk says. “Sardines is fifteen cents.” He also calls them
sour-deens
.

She muses. “What have you got in a can for a nickel?”

“Aint got nothing except shoeblacking. I dont reckon you want that. Not to eat, noway.”

“I reckon I’ll take the fifteen cent ones, then.” She unties the bundle and the knotted sack. It requires some time to solve the knots. But she unties them patiently, one by one, and pays and knots the sack and the bundle again and takes up her purchase. When she emerges onto the porch there is a wagon standing at the steps. A man is on the seat.

“Here’s a wagon going to town,” they tell her. “He will take you in.”

Her face wakes, serene, slow, warm. “Why, you’re right kind,” she says.

The wagon moves slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny loneliness of the enormous land it were outside of, beyond all time and all haste. From Varner’s store to Jefferson
it is twelve miles. “Will we get there before dinner time?” she says.

The driver spits. “We mought,” he says.

Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon. Apparently she has never looked at him, either. She does not do so now. “I reckon you go to Jefferson a right smart.”

He says, “Some.” The wagon creaks on. Fields and woods seem to hang in some inescapable middle distance, at once static and fluid, quick, like mirages. Yet the wagon passes them.

“I reckon you dont know anybody in Jefferson named Lucas Burch.”

“Burch?”

“I’m looking to meet him there. He works at the planing mill.”

“No,” the driver says. “I dont know that I know him. But likely there is a right smart of folks in Jefferson I dont know. Likely he is there.”

“I’ll declare, I hope so. Travelling is getting right bothersome.”

The driver does not look at her. “How far have you come, looking for him?”

“From Alabama. It’s a right fur piece.”

He does not look at her. His voice is quite casual. “How did your folks come to let you start out, in your shape?”

“My folks are dead. I live with my brother. I just decided to come on.”

“I see. He sent you word to come to Jefferson.”

She does not answer. He can see beneath the sunbonnet
her calm profile. The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels. The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap. She looks up at the sun. “I reckon it’s time to eat,” she says. He watches from the corner of his eye as she opens the cheese and crackers and the sardines, and offers them.

“I wouldn’t care for none,” he says.

“I’d take it kind for you to share.”

“I wouldn’t care to. You go ahead and eat.”

She begins to eat. She eats slowly, steadily, sucking the rich sardine oil from her fingers with slow and complete relish. Then she stops, not abruptly, yet with utter completeness, her jaw stilled in midchewing, a bitten cracker in her hand and her face lowered a little and her eyes blank, as if she were listening to something very far away or so near as to be inside her. Her face has drained of color, of its full, hearty blood, and she sits quite still, hearing and feeling the implacable and immemorial earth, but without fear or alarm. ‘It’s twins at least,’ she says to herself, without lip movement, without sound. Then the spasm passes. She eats again. The wagon has not stopped; time has not stopped. The wagon crests the final hill and they see smoke.