Light in August (48 page)

He walks back to town slowly—a gaunt, paunched man in a soiled panama hat and the tail of a coarse cotton nightshirt thrust into his black trousers. ‘Luckily I did take time to put on my shoes,’ he thinks. ‘I am tired,’ he thinks, fretfully. ‘I am tired, and I shall not be able to sleep.’ He is thinking it fretfully, wearily, keeping time to his feet when
he turns into his gate. The sun is now high, the town has wakened; he smells the smoke here and there of cooking breakfasts. ‘The least thing he could have done,’ he thinks, ‘since he would not leave me the mule, would have been to ride ahead and start a fire in my stove for me. Since he thinks it better for my appetite to take a two-mile stroll before eating.’

He goes to the kitchen and builds a fire in the stove, slowly, clumsily; as clumsily after twentyfive years as on the first day he had ever attempted it, and puts coffee on. ‘Then I’ll go back to bed,’ he thinks. ‘But I know I shall not sleep.’ But he notices that his thinking sounds querulous, like the peaceful whining of a querulous woman who is not even listening to herself; then he finds that he is preparing his usual hearty breakfast, and he stops quite still, clicking his tongue as though in displeasure. ‘I ought to feel worse than I do,’ he thinks. But he has to admit that he does not. And as he stands, tall, misshapen, lonely in his lonely and illkept kitchen, holding in his hand an iron skillet in which yesterday’s old grease is bleakly caked, there goes through him a glow, a wave, a surge of something almost hot, almost triumphant. ‘I showed them!’ he thinks. ‘Life comes to the old man yet, while they get there too late. They get there for his leavings, as Byron would say.’ But this is vanity and empty pride. Yet the slow and fading glow disregards it, impervious to reprimand. He thinks, ‘What if I do? What if I do feel it? triumph and pride? What if I do?’ But the warmth, the glow, evidently does not regard or need buttressing either; neither is it quenched by the actuality of an orange and eggs and toast. And he looks down at the soiled and empty dishes
on the table and he says, aloud now: “Bless my soul. I’m not even going to wash them now.” Neither does he go to his bedroom to try to sleep. He goes to the door and looks in, with that glow of purpose and pride, thinking, ‘If I were a woman, now. That’s what a woman would do: go back to bed to rest.’ He goes to the study. He moves like a man with a purpose now, who for twentyfive years has been doing nothing at all between the time to wake and the time to sleep again. Neither is the book which he now chooses the Tennyson: this time also he chooses food for a man. It is Henry IV and he goes out into the back yard and lies down in the sagging deck chair beneath the mulberry tree, plumping solidly and heavily into it. ‘But I shant be able to sleep,’ he thinks, ‘because Byron will be in soon to wake me. But to learn just what else he can think of to want me to do, will be almost worth the waking.’

He goes to sleep soon, almost immediately, snoring. Anyone pausing to look down into the chair would have seen, beneath the twin glares of sky in the spectacles, a face innocent, peaceful, and assured. But no one comes, though when he wakes almost six hours later, he seems to believe that someone has called him. He sits up abruptly, the chair creaking beneath him. “Yes?” he says. “Yes? What is it?” But there is no one there, though for a moment longer he looks about, seeming to listen and to wait, with that air forceful and assured. And the glow is not gone either. ‘Though I had hoped to sleep it off,’ he thinks, thinking at once, ‘No. I dont mean
hoped
. What is in my thought is
feared
. And so I have surrendered too,’ he thinks, quiet, still. He begins to rub his hands, gently at first, a little guiltily. ‘I have surrendered too.
And I will permit myself. Yes. Perhaps this too is reserved for me. And so I shall permit myself.’ And then he says it, thinks it   
That child that I delivered. I have no namesake. But I have known them before this to be named by a grateful mother for the doctor who officiated. But then, there is Byron. Byron of course will take the
pas
of me. She will have to have others, more
   remembering the young strong body from out whose travail even there shone something tranquil and unafraid.   
More of them. Many more. That will be her life, her destiny. The good stock peopling in tranquil obedience to it the good earth; from these hearty loins without hurry or haste descending mother and daughter. But by Byron engendered next. Poor boy. Even though he did let me walk back home

He enters the house. He shaves and removes the nightshirt and puts on the shirt which he had worn yesterday, and a collar and the lawn tie and the panama hat. The walk out to the cabin does not take him as long as the walk home did, even though he goes now through the woods where the walking is harder. ‘I must do this more often,’ he thinks, feeling the intermittent sun, the heat, smelling the savage and fecund odor of the earth, the woods, the loud silence. ‘I should never have lost this habit, too. But perhaps they will both come back to me, if this itself be not the same as prayer.’

He emerges from the woods at the far side of the pasture behind the cabin. Beyond the cabin he can see the clump of trees in which the house had stood and burned, though from here he cannot see the charred and mute embers of what were once planks and beams. ‘Poor woman,’ he thinks. ‘Poor, barren woman. To have not lived only a week longer, until luck returned to this place. Until luck and life returned to
these barren and ruined acres.’ It seems to him that he can see, feel, about him the ghosts of rich fields, and of the rich fecund black life of the quarters, the mellow shouts, the presence of fecund women, the prolific naked children in the dust before the doors; and the big house again, noisy, loud with the treble shouts of the generations. He reaches the cabin. He does not knock; with his hand already opening the door he calls in a hearty voice that almost booms: “Can the doctor come in?”

The cabin is empty save for the mother and child. She is propped up on the cot, the child at breast. As Hightower enters, she is in the act of drawing the sheet up over her bared bosom, watching the door not with alarm at all, but with alertness, her face fixed in an expression serene and warm, as though she were about to smile. He sees this fade. “I thought——” she says.

“Who did you think?” he says, booms. He comes to the cot and looks down at her, at the tiny, weazened, terracotta face of the child which seems to hang suspended without body and still asleep, from the breast. Again she draws the sheet closer, modest and tranquil, while above her the gaunt, paunched, bald man stands with an expression on his face gentle, beaming, and triumphant. She is looking down at the child.

“It looks like he just cant get caught up. I think he is asleep again and I lay him down and then he hollers and I have to put him back again.”

“You ought not to be here alone,” he says. He looks about the room. “Where——”

“She’s gone, too. To town. She didn’t say, but that’s where she has gone. He slipped out, and when she woke up
she asked me where he was and I told her he went out, and she followed him.”

“To town? Slipped out?” Then he says “Oh” quietly. His face is grave now.

“She watched him all day. And he was watching her. I could tell it. He was making out like he was asleep. She thought that he was asleep. And so after dinner she gave out. She hadn’t rested any last night, and after dinner she set in the chair and dozed. And he was watching her, and he got up from the other cot, careful, winking and squinching his face at me. He went to the door, still winking and squinting back at me over his shoulder, and tiptoed out. And I never tried to stop him nor wake her, neither.” She looks at Hightower, her eyes grave, wide. “I was scared to. He talks funny. And the way he was looking at me. Like all the winking and squinching was not for me to not wake her up, but to tell me what would happen to me if I did. And I was scared to. And so I laid here with the baby and pretty soon she jerked awake. And then I knew she hadn’t aimed to go to sleep. It was like she come awake already running to the cot where he had been, touching it like she couldn’t believe he had done got away. Because she stood there at the cot, pawing at the blanket like maybe she thought he was mislaid inside the blanket somewhere. And then she looked at me, once. And she wasn’t winking and squinting, but I nigh wished she was. And she asked me and I told her and she put on her hat and went out.” She looks at Hightower. “I’m glad she’s gone. I reckon I ought not to say it, after all she done for me. But…….”

Hightower stands over the cot. He does not seem to see
her. His face is very grave; it is almost like it had grown ten years older while he stood there. Or like his face looks now as it should look and that when he entered the room, it had been a stranger to itself. “To town,” he says. Then his eyes wake, seeing again. “Well. It cant be helped now,” he says. “Besides, the men downtown, the sane…….there will be a few of them.——Why are you glad they are gone?”

She looks down. Her hand moves about the baby’s head, not touching it: a gesture instinctive, unneeded, apparently unconscious of itself. “She has been kind. More than kind. Holding the baby so I could rest. She wants to hold him all the time, setting there in that chair——You’ll have to excuse me. I aint once invited you to set.” She watches him as he draws the chair up to the cot and sits down. “——setting there where she could watch him on the cot, making out that he was asleep.” She looks at Hightower; her eyes are questioning, intent. “She keeps on calling him Joey. When his name aint Joey. And she keeps on.…” She watches Hightower. Her eyes are puzzled now, questioning, doubtful. “She keeps on talking about——She is mixed up someway. And sometimes I get mixed up too, listening, having to…….” Her eyes, her words, grope, fumble.

“Mixed up?”

“She keeps on talking about him like his pa was that——the one in jail, that Mr Christmas. She keeps on, and then I get mixed up and it’s like sometimes I cant——like I am mixed up too and I think that his pa is that Mr——Mr Christmas too——” She watches him; it is as though she makes a tremendous effort of some kind. “But I know that aint so. I know that’s foolish. It’s because she keeps on saying
it and saying it, and maybe I aint strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid…….”

“Of what?”

“I dont like to get mixed up. And I am afraid she might get me mixed up, like they say how you might cross your eyes and then you cant uncross…….” She stops looking at him. She does not move. She can feel him watching her.

“You say the baby’s name is not Joe. What is his name?”

For a moment longer she does not look at Hightower. Then she looks up. She says, too immediately, too easily: “I aint named him yet.”

And he knows why. It is as though he sees her for the first time since he entered. He notices for the first time that her hair has been recently combed and that she has freshened her face too, and he sees, half hidden by the sheet, as if she had thrust them hurriedly there when he entered, a comb and a shard of broken mirror. “When I came in, you were expecting someone. And it was not me. Who were you expecting?”

She does not look away. Her face is neither innocent nor dissimulating. Neither is it placid and serene. “Expecting?”

“Was it Byron Bunch you expected?” Still she does not look away. Hightower’s face is sober, firm, gentle. Yet in it is that ruthlessness which she has seen in the faces of a few good people, men usually, whom she has known. He leans forward and lays his hand on hers where it supports the child’s body. “Byron is a good man,” he says.

“I reckon I know that, well as anybody. Better than most.”

“And you are a good woman. Will be. I dont
mean——” he says quickly. Then he ceases. “I didn’t mean——”

“I reckon I know,” she says.

“No. Not this. This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward. With yourself. With others.” He looks at her; she does not look away. “Let him go. Send him away from you.” They look at one another. “Send him away, daughter. You are probably not much more than half his age. But you have already outlived him twice over. He will never overtake you, catch up with you, because he has wasted too much time. And that too, his nothing, is as irremediable as your all. He can no more ever cast back and do, than you can cast back and undo. You have a manchild that is not his, by a man that is not him. You will be forcing into his life two men and only the third part of a woman, who deserves at the least that the nothing with which he has lived for thirtyfive years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away.”

“That aint for me to do. He is free. Ask him. I have not tried once to hold him.”

“That’s it. You probably could not have held him, if you had tried to. That’s it. If you had known how to try. But then, if you had known that, you would not be here in this cot, with this child at your breast. And you wont send him away? You wont say the word?”

“I can say no more than I have said. And I said No to him five days ago.”

“No?”

“He said for me to marry him. To not wait. And I said No.”

“Would you say No now?”

She looks at him steadily. “Yes. I would say it now.”

He sighs, huge, shapeless; his face is again slack, weary. “I believe you. You will continue to say it until after you have seen——” He looks at her again; again his gaze is intent, hard. “Where is he? Byron?”

She looks at him. After a while she says quietly: “I dont know.” She looks at him; suddenly her face is quite empty, as though something which gave it actual solidity and firmness were beginning to drain out of it. Now there is nothing of dissimulation nor alertness nor caution in it. “This morning about ten oclock he came back. He didn’t come in. He just came to the door and he stood there and he just looked at me. And I hadn’t seen him since last night and he hadn’t seen the baby and I said ‘Come and see him’ and he looked at me, standing there in the door, and he said ‘I come to find out when you want to see him’ and I said ‘See who?’ and he said ‘They may have to send a deputy with him but I can persuade Kennedy to let him come’ and I said ‘Let who come?’ and he said ‘Lucas. Burch’ and I said ‘Yes’ and he said ‘This evening? Will that do?’ and I said ‘Yes’ and he went away. He just stood there, and then he went away.” While he watches her with that despair of all men in the presence of female tears, she begins to cry. She sits upright, the child at her breast, crying, not loud and not hard, but with a patient and hopeless abjectness, not hiding her face. “And you worry me about if I said No or not and I already said No and you worry me and worry me and now he is already gone. I will never see him again.” And he sits there, and she bows her head at last, and he rises and stands over her with his hand on her
bowed head, thinking   
Thank God, God help me. Thank God, God help me