Light in August (16 page)

He did not move nor speak. He might have been carven, a large toy: small, still, round headed and round eyed, in overalls. He was still with astonishment, shock, outrage. Looking at the dollar, he seemed to see ranked tubes of toothpaste like corded wood, endless and terrifying; his whole being coiled in a rich and passionate revulsion. “I dont want no more,” he said. ‘I dont never want no more,’ he thought.

Then he didn’t dare even look at her face. He could feel her, hear her, her long shuddering breath.   
Now it’s coming
   he thought in a flashing instant. But she didn’t even shake him. She just held him, hard, not shaking him, as if her hand too didn’t know what it wanted to do next. Her face was so near that he could feel her breath on his cheek. He didn’t need to look up to know what her face looked like now. “Tell!” she said. “Tell, then! You little nigger bastard! You nigger bastard!”

That was the third day. On the fourth day she became quite calmly and completely mad. She no longer planned at all. Her subsequent actions followed a kind of divination, as
if the days and the unsleeping nights during which she had nursed behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil.

She was quite calm now. She had escaped for the moment from even urgency. It was as though now she had time to look about and plan. Looking about the scene her glance, her mind, her thought, went full and straight and instantaneous to the janitor sitting in the door of the furnace room. There was no ratiocination in it, no design. She just seemed to look outside herself for one moment like a passenger in a car, and saw without any surprise at all that small, dirty man sitting in a splint chair in a sootgrimed doorway, reading through steelrimmed spectacles from a book upon his knees—a figure, almost a fixture, of which she had been aware for five years now without once having actually looked at him. She would not have recognised his face on the street. She would have passed him without knowing him, even though he was a man. Her life now seemed straight and simple as a corridor with him sitting at the end of it. She went to him at once, already in motion upon the dingy path before she was aware that she had started.

He was sitting in his splint chair in the doorway, the open book upon his knees. When she approached she saw that it was the Bible. But she just noticed this, as she might have noticed a fly upon his leg. “You hate him too,” she said. “You’ve been watching him too. I’ve seen you. Dont say you dont.” He looked up at her face, the spectacles propped now above his brows. He was not an old man. In his present occupation he was an incongruity. He was a hard man, in his
prime; a man who should have been living a hard and active life, and whom time, circumstance, something, had betrayed, sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of fortyfive into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixtyfive. “You know,” she said. “You knew before the other children started calling him Nigger. You came out here at the same time. You weren’t working here a month before that Christmas night when Charley found him on the doorstep yonder. Tell me.” The janitor’s face was round, a little flabby, quite dirty, with a dirty stubble. His eyes were quite clear, quite gray, quite cold. They were quite mad too. But the woman did not notice that. Or perhaps they did not look mad to her. So they faced one another in the coalgrimed doorway, mad eyes looking into mad eyes, mad voice talking to mad voice as calm and quiet and terse as two conspirators. “I’ve watched you for five years.” She believed that she was telling the truth. “Sitting here in this very chair, watching him. You never sit here except when the children are outdoors. But as soon as they come out, you bring this chair here to the door and sit in it where you can watch them. Watching him and hearing the other children calling him Nigger. That’s what you are doing. I know. You came here just to do that, to watch him and hate him. You were here ready when he came. Maybe you brought him and left him on the step yonder yourself. But anyway you know. And I’ve got to know. When he tells I will be fired. And Charley may——will——Tell me. Tell me, now.”

“Ah,” the janitor said. “I knowed he would be there to catch you when God’s time came. I knowed. I know who set him there, a sign and a damnation for bitchery.”

“Yes. He was right behind the curtain. As close as you are. You tell me, now. I’ve seen your eyes when you look at him. Watched you. For five years.”

“I know,” he said. “I know evil. Aint I made evil to get up and walk God’s world? A walking pollution in God’s own face I made it.
Out of the mouths of little children He never concealed it. You have heard them. I never told them to say it, to call him in his rightful nature, by the name of his damnation. I never told them. They knowed. They was told, but it wasn’t by me. I just waited, on His own good time, when He would see fitten to reveal it to His living world. And it’s come now. This is the sign, wrote again in woman-sinning and bitchery.”

“Yes. But what must I do? Tell me.”

“Wait. Like I waited. Five years I waited for the Lord to move and show His will. And He done it. You wait too. When He is ready for it He will show His will to them that have the sayso.”

“Yes. The sayso.” They glared at one another, still, breathing quietly.

“The madam. When He is ready, He will reveal it to her.”

“You mean, if the madam knows, she will send him away? Yes. But I cant wait.”

“No more can you hurry the Lord God. Aint I waited five years?”

She began to beat her hands lightly together. “But dont you see? This may be the Lord’s way. For you to tell me. Because you know. Maybe it’s His way for you to tell me and me to tell the madam.” Her mad eyes were quite calm,
her mad voice patient and calm: it was only her light unceasing hands.

“You’ll wait, the same as I waited,” he said. “You have felt the weight of the Lord’s remorseful hand for maybe three days. I have lived under it for five years, watching and waiting for His own good time, because my sin is greater than your sin.” Though he was looking directly at her face he did not seem to see her at all, his eyes did not. They looked like they were blind, wide open, icecold, fanatical. “To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering aint no more than a handful of rotten dirt. I done bore mine five years; who are you to hurry Almighty God with your little womanfilth?”

She turned, at once. “Well. You dont have to tell me. I know, anyway. I’ve known it all the time that he’s part nigger.” She returned to the house. She did not walk fast now and she yawned, terrifically. ‘All I have to do is to think of some way to make the madam believe it. He wont tell her, back me up.’ She yawned again, tremendously, her face emptied now of everything save yawning and then emptied even of yawning. She had just thought of something else. She had not thought of it before, but she believed that she had, had known it all the while, because it seemed so right: he would not only be removed; he would be punished for having given her terror and worry. ‘They’ll send him to the nigger orphanage,’ she thought. ‘Of course. They will have to.’

She did not even go to the matron at once. She had started there, but instead of turning toward the office door she saw herself passing it, going on toward the stairs and mounting. It was as though she followed herself to see where
she was going. In the corridor, quiet and empty now, she yawned again, with utter relaxation. She entered her room and locked the door and took off her clothes and got into bed. The shades were drawn and she lay still in the more than halfdark, on her back. Her eyes were closed and her face was empty and smooth. After a while she began to open her legs and close them slowly, feeling the sheets flow cool and smooth over them and then flow warm and smooth again. Thinking seemed to hang suspended between the sleep which she had not had now in three nights and the sleep which she was about to receive, her body open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man. ‘All I need do is to make the madam believe,’ she thought. And then she thought   
He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans

That was in the afternoon. At nine that evening she was undressing again when she heard the janitor come up the corridor, toward her door. She did not, could not, know who it was, then somehow she did know, hearing the steady feet and then a knock at the door which already began to open before she could spring to it. She didn’t call; she sprang to the door, putting her weight against it, holding it to. “I’m undressing!” she said, in a thin, agonised voice, knowing who it was. He didn’t answer, his weight firm and steady against the crawling door, beyond the crawling gap. “You cant come in here!” she cried, hardly louder than a whisper. “Dont you know that they…….” Her voice was panting, fainting, and desperate. He did not answer. She tried to halt and hold the slow inward crawling of the door. “Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll come out there. Will you do that?” She spoke in that fainting whisper, her tone light, inconsequential,
like that of one speaking to an unpredictable child or a maniac: soothing, cajoling: “You wait, now. Do you hear? Will you wait, now?” He did not answer. The slow and irresistible crawling of the door did not cease. Leaning against it, wearing nothing save her undergarment, she was like a puppet in some burlesque of rapine and despair. Leaning, downlooking, immobile, she appeared to be in deepest thought, as if the puppet in the midst of the scene had gone astray within itself. Then she turned, releasing the door, and sprang back to the bed, whipping up without looking at it a garment and whirling to face the door, clutching the garment at her breast, huddling. He had already entered; apparently he had been watching her and waiting during the whole blind interval of fumbling and interminable haste.

He still wore the overalls and he now wore his hat. He did not remove it. Again his cold mad gray eyes did not seem to see her, to look at her at all. “If the Lord Himself come into the room of one of you,” he said, “you would believe He come in bitchery.” He said, “Have you told her?”

The woman sat on the bed. She seemed to sink slowly back upon it, clutching the garment, watching him, her face blanched. “Told her?”

“What will she do with him?”

“Do?” She watched him: those bright, still eyes that seemed not to look at her so much as to envelop her. Her mouth hung open like the mouth of an idiot.

“Where will they send him to?” She didn’t answer. “Dont lie to me, to the Lord God. They’ll send him to the one for niggers.” Her mouth closed; it was as if she had discovered at last what he was talking about. “Ay, I’ve
thought it out. They’ll send him to the one for nigger children.” She didn’t answer, but she was watching him now, her eyes still a little fearful but secret too, calculating. Now he was looking at her; his eyes seemed to contract upon her shape and being. “Answer me, Jezebel!” he shouted.

“Shhhhhhhhh!” she said. “Yes. They’ll have to. When they find…….”

“Ah,” he said. His gaze faded; the eyes released her and enveloped her again. Looking at them, she seemed to see herself as less than nothing in them, trivial as a twig floating upon a pool. Then his eyes became almost human. He began to look about the womanroom as if he had never seen one before: the close room, warm, littered, womanpinksmelling. “Womanfilth,” he said. “Before the face of God.” He turned and went out. After a while the woman rose. She stood for a time, clutching the garment, motionless, idiotic, staring at the empty door as if she could not think what to tell herself to do. Then she ran. She sprang to the door, flinging herself upon it, crashing it to and locking it, leaning against it, panting, clutching the turned key in both hands.

At breakfast time the next morning the janitor and the child were missing. No trace of them could be found. The police were notified at once. A side door was found to be unlocked, to which the janitor had a key.

“It’s because he knows,” the dietitian told the matron.

“Knows what?”

“That that child, that Christmas boy, is a nigger.”

“A what?” the matron said. Backthrust in her chair, she glared at the younger woman. “A ne——I dont believe it!” she cried. “I dont believe it!”

“You dont have to believe it,” the other said. “But he knows it. He stole him away because of it.”

The matron was past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes. “I dont believe it!” she said. But on the third day she sent for the dietitian. She looked as if she had not slept in some time. The dietitian, on the contrary, was quite fresh, quite serene. She was still unshaken when the matron told her the news, that the man and the child had been found. “At Little Rock,” the matron said. “He tried to put the child into an orphanage there. They thought he was crazy and held him until the police came.” She looked at the younger woman. “You told me……. The other day you said……. How did you know about this?”

The dietitian did not look away. “I didn’t. I had no idea at all. Of course I knew it didn’t mean anything when the other children called him Nigger——”

“Nigger?” the matron said. “The other children?”

“They have been calling him Nigger for years. Sometimes I think that children have a way of knowing things that grown people of your and my age dont see. Children, and old people like him, like that old man. That’s why he always sat in the door yonder while they were playing in the yard: watching that child. Maybe he found it out from hearing the other children call him Nigger. But he might have known before hand. If you remember, they came here about the same time. He hadn’t been working here hardly a month before the night—that Christmas, dont you remember—when Ch—they found the baby on the doorstep.” She spoke smoothly, watching the baffled, shrinking eyes of the older woman full upon her own as though she could not remove
them. The dietitian’s eyes were bland and innocent. “And so the other day we were talking and he was trying to tell me something about the child. It was something he wanted to tell me, tell somebody, and finally he lost his nerve maybe and wouldn’t tell it, and so I left him. I wasn’t thinking about it at all. It had gone completely out of my mind when——” Her voice ceased. She gazed at the matron while into her face there came an expression of enlightenment, sudden comprehension; none could have said if it were simulated or not. “Why, that’s why it……. Why, I see it all, now. What happened just the day before they were gone, missing. I was in the corridor, going to my room; it was the same day I happened to be talking to him and he refused to tell me whatever it was he started to tell, when all of a sudden he came up and stopped me; I thought then it was funny because I had never before seen him inside the house. And he said—he sounded crazy, he looked crazy. I was scared, too scared to move, with him blocking the corridor—he said ‘Have you told her yet?’ and I said ‘Told who? Told who what?’ and then I realised he meant you; if I had told you that he had tried to tell me something about the child. But I didn’t know what he meant for me to tell you and I wanted to scream and then he said ‘What will she do if she finds it out?’ and I didn’t know what to say or how to get away from him and then he said ‘You dont have to tell me. I know what she will do. She will send him to the one for niggers.’ ”