Light in August (43 page)

“They went straight to the garage where Salmon keeps his rent car. She did all the talking. She said they wanted to go to Jefferson. Maybe they never dreamed that Salmon would charge them more than a quarter apiece, because when he said three dollars she asked him again, like maybe she could not believe her ears. ‘Three dollars,’ Salmon says. ‘I couldn’t do it for no less.’ And them standing there and Uncle
Doc not taking any part, like he was waiting, like it wasn’t any concern of his, like he knew that he wouldn’t need to bother: that she would get them there.

“ ‘I cant pay that,’ she says.

“ ‘You wont get it done no cheaper,’ Salmon says. ‘Unless by the railroad. They’ll take you for fiftytwo cents apiece.’ But she was already going away, with Uncle Doc following her like a dog would.

“That was about four oclock. Until six oclock the folks saw them sitting on a bench in the courthouse yard. They were not talking: it was like each one never even knew the other one was there. They just set there side by side, with her all dressed up in her Sunday clothes. Maybe she was enjoying herself, all dressed up and downtown all Saturday evening. Maybe it was to her what being in Memphis all day would be to other folks.

“They set there until the clock struck six. Then they got up. Folks that saw it said she never said a word to him; that they just got up at the same time, like two birds do from a limb and a man cant tell which one of them give the signal. When they walked, Uncle Doc walked a little behind her. They crossed the square this way and turned into the street toward the depot. And the folks knew that there wasn’t any train due for three hours and they wondered if they actually were going somewhere on the train, before they found out that they were going to do something that surprised the folks more than that, even. They went to that little café down by the depot and ate supper, that hadn’t ever been seen together on the street before, let alone eating in a café, since they come
to Mottstown. But that’s where she took him; maybe they were afraid they would miss the train if they ate downtown. Because they were there before half past six oclock, sitting on two of them little stools at the counter, eating what she had ordered without asking Uncle Doc about it at all. She asked the café man about the train to Jefferson and he told her it went at two a.m. ‘Lots of excitement in Jefferson tonight,’ he says. ‘You can get a car downtown and be in Jefferson in fortyfive minutes. You dont need to wait until two oclock on that train.’ He thought they were strangers maybe; he told her which way town was.

“But she didn’t say anything and they finished eating and she paid him, a nickel and a dime at a time out of a tiedup rag that she took out of the umbrella, with Uncle Doc setting there and waiting with that dazed look in his face like he was walking in his sleep. Then they left, and the café man thought they were going to take his advice and go to town and get that car when he looked out and saw them going on across the switch tracks, toward the depot. Once he started to call, but he didn’t. ‘I reckon I misunderstood her,’ he says he thought. ‘Maybe it’s the nine oclock southbound they want.’

“They were sitting on the bench in the waiting room when the folks, the drummers and loafers and such, begun to come in and buy tickets for the southbound. The agent said how he noticed there was some folks in the waiting room when he come in after supper at half past seven, but that he never noticed particular until she come to the ticket window and asked what time the train left for Jefferson. He said he was busy at the time and that he just glanced up and says
‘Tomorrow’ without stopping what he was doing. Then he said that after a while something made him look up, and there was that round face watching him and that plume still in the window, and she says,

“ ‘I want two tickets on it.’

“ ‘That train is not due until two oclock in the morning,’ the agent says. He didn’t recognise her either. ‘If you want to get to Jefferson anytime soon, you’d better go to town and hire a car. Do you know which way town is?’ But he said she just stood there, counting nickels and dimes out of that knotted rag, and he came and gave her the two tickets and then he looked past her through the window and saw Uncle Doc and he knew who she was. And he said how they sat there and the folks for the southbound come in and the train come and left and they still set there. He said how Uncle Doc still looked like he was asleep, or doped or something. And then the train went, but some of the folks didn’t go back to town. They stayed there, looking in the window, and now and then they would come in and look at Uncle Doc and his wife setting on the bench, until the agent turned off the lights in the waitingroom.

“Some of the folks stayed, even after that. They could look in the window and see them setting there in the dark. Maybe they could see the plume, and the white of Uncle Doc’s head. And then Uncle Doc begun to wake up. It wasn’t like he was surprised to find where he was, nor that he was where he didn’t want to be. He just roused up, like he had been coasting for a long time now, and now was the time to put on the power again. They could hear her saying ‘Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhh.’ to him, and then his voice would
break out. They were still setting there when the agent turned on the lights and told them that the two oclock train was coming, with her saying ‘Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhhh’ like to a baby, and Uncle Doc hollering ‘Bitchery and abomination! Abomination and bitchery!’ ”

16

W
hen his knock gets no response, Byron leaves the porch and goes around the house and enters the small, enclosed back yard. He sees the chair at once beneath the mulberry tree. It is a canvas deck chair, mended and faded and sagged so long to the shape of Hightower’s body that even when empty it seems to hold still in ghostly embrace the owner’s obese shapelessness; approaching, Byron thinks how the mute chair evocative of disuse and supineness and shabby remoteness from the world, is somehow the symbol and the being too of the man himself. ‘That I am going to disturb again,’ he thinks, with that faint lift of lip, thinking
Again? The disturbing I have done him, even he will see that that disturbing is nothing now. And on Sunday again. But then I reckon Sunday would want to take revenge on him too, being as Sunday was invented by folks

He comes up behind the chair and looks down into it. Hightower is asleep. Upon the swell of his paunch, where the white shirt (it is a clean and fresh one now) balloons out of the worn black trousers, an open book lies face down. Upon the book Hightower’s hands are folded, peaceful, benignant, almost pontifical. The shirt is made after an old fashion, with a pleated though carelessly ironed bosom, and he wears no collar. His mouth is open, the loose and flabby flesh sagging away from the round orifice in which the stained lower teeth show, and from the still fine nose which alone age, the defeat of sheer years, has not changed. Looking down at the unconscious face, it seems to Byron as though the whole man were fleeing away from the nose which holds invincibly to something yet of pride and courage above the sluttishness of vanquishment like a forgotten flag above a ruined fortress. Again light, the reflection of sky beyond the mulberry leaves, glints and glares upon the spectacle lenses, so that Byron cannot tell just when Hightower’s eyes open. He sees only the mouth shut, and a movement of the folded hands as Hightower sits up. “Yes,” he says; “yes? Who is——Oh, Byron.”

Byron looks down at him, his face quite grave. But it is not compassionate now. It is not anything: it is just quite sober and quite determined. He says, without any inflection at all: “They caught him yesterday. I dont reckon you have heard that any more than you heard about the killing.”

“Caught him?”

“Christmas. In Mottstown. He came to town, and near as I can learn, he stood around on the street until somebody recognised him.”

“Caught him.” Hightower is sitting up in the chair now.
“And you have come to tell me that he is——that they have.…”

“No. Aint anybody done anything to him yet. He aint dead yet. He’s in the jail. He’s all right.”

“All right. You say that he is all right. Byron says that he is all right——Byron Bunch has helped the woman’s paramour sell his friend for a thousand dollars, and Byron says that it is all right. Has kept the woman hidden from the father of her child, while that——Shall I say, other paramour, Byron? Shall I say that? Shall I refrain from the truth because Byron Bunch hides it?”

“If public talking makes truth, then I reckon that is truth. Especially when they find out that I have got both of them locked up in jail.”

“Both of them?”

“Brown too. Though I reckon most folks have about decided that Brown wasn’t anymore capable of doing that killing or helping in it than he was in catching the man that did do it or helping in that. But they can all say that Byron Bunch has now got him locked up safe in jail.”

“Ah yes.” Hightower’s voice shakes a little, high and thin. “Byron Bunch, the guardian of public weal and morality. The gainer, the inheritor of rewards, since it will now descend upon the morganatic wife of——Shall I say that too? Shall I read Byron there too?” Then he begins to cry, sitting huge and lax in the sagging chair. “I dont mean that. You know I dont. But it is not right to bother me, to worry me, when I have——when I have taught myself to stay——have been taught by them to stay——That this should come to me, taking me after I am old, and reconciled to what they
deemed——” Once before Byron saw him sit while sweat ran down his face like tears; now he sees the tears themselves run down the flabby cheeks like sweat.

“I know. It’s a poor thing. A poor thing to worry you. I didn’t know. I didn’t know, when I first got into it. Or I would have……. But you are a man of God. You cant dodge that.”

“I am not a man of God. And not through my own desire. Remember that. Not of my own choice that I am no longer a man of God. It was by the will, the more than behest, of them like you and like her and like him in the jail yonder and like them who put him there to do their will upon, as they did upon me, with insult and violence upon those who like them were created by the same God and were driven by them to do that which they now turn and rend them for having done it. It was not my choice. Remember that.”

“I know that. Because a man aint given that many choices. You made your choice before that.” Hightower looks at him. “You were given your choice before I was born, and you took it before I or her or him either was born. That was your choice. And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad. The same as her, and him, and me. And the same as them others, that other woman.”

“That other woman? Another woman? Must my life after fifty years be violated and my peace destroyed by two lost women, Byron?”

“This other one aint lost now. She has been lost for thirty years. But she is found now. She’s his grandmother.”

“Whose grandmother?”

“Christmas’,” Byron says.

Waiting, watching the street and the gate from the dark study window, Hightower hears the distant music when it first begins. He does not know that he expects it, that on each Wednesday and Sunday night, sitting in the dark window, he waits for it to begin. He knows almost to the second when he should begin to hear it, without recourse to watch or clock. He uses neither, has needed neither for twentyfive years now. He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it. It is as though out of his subconscious he produces without volition the few crystallizations of stated instances by which his dead life in the actual world had been governed and ordered once. Without recourse to clock he could know immediately upon the thought just where, in his old life, he would be and what doing between the two fixed moments which marked the beginning and the end of Sunday morning service and Sunday evening service and prayer service on Wednesday night; just when he would have been entering the church, just when he would have been bringing to a calculated close prayer or sermon. So before twilight has completely faded he is saying to himself   
Now they are gathering, approaching along the street slowly and turning in, greeting one another: the groups, the couples, the single ones. There is a little informal talking in the church itself, lowtoned, the ladies constant and a little sibilant with fans, nodding to arriving friends as they pass in the aisle. Miss Carruthers
   (she was his organist and she has been dead almost twenty years)
is among them; soon she will rise and enter the organloft
   Sunday evening prayer meeting. It has seemed
to him always that at that hour man approaches nearest of all to God, nearer than at any other hour of all the seven days. Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.