Light in August (49 page)

He found Christmas’ old path through the woods to the mill. He did not know that it was there, but when he found in which direction it ran, it seemed like an omen to him in his exultation. He believes her, but he wants to corroborate the information for the sheer pleasure of hearing it again. It is just four oclock when he reaches the mill. He inquires at the office.

“Bunch?” the bookkeeper says. “You wont find him here. He quit this morning.”

“I know, I know,” Hightower says.

“Been with the company for seven years, Saturday evenings too. Then this morning he walked in and said he was quitting. No reason. But that’s the way these hillbillies do.”

“Yes, yes,” Hightower says. “They are fine people, though. Fine men and women.” He leaves the office. The road to town passes the planer shed, where Byron worked. He knows Mooney, the foreman. “I hear Byron Bunch is not with you anymore,” he says, pausing.

“Yes,” Mooney says. “He quit this morning.” But Hightower is not listening; the overalled men watch the shabby, queershaped, not-quite-familiar figure looking with a kind of exultant interest at the walls, the planks, the cryptic machinery whose very being and purpose he could not have understood or even learned. “If you want to see him,” Mooney says, “I reckon you’ll find him downtown at the courthouse.”

“At the courthouse?”

“Yes, sir. Grand Jury meets today. Special call. To indict that murderer.”

“Yes, yes,” Hightower says. “So he is gone. Yes. A fine young man. Goodday, goodday, gentlemen. Goodday to you.” He goes on, while the men in overalls look after him for a time. His hands are clasped behind him. He paces on, thinking quietly, peacefully, sadly: ‘Poor man. Poor fellow. No man is, can be, justified in taking human life; least of all, a warranted officer, a sworn servant of his fellowman. When it is sanctioned publicly in the person of an elected officer who knows that he has not himself suffered at the hands of his victim, call that victim by what name you will, how can we expect an individual to refrain when he believes that he has suffered at the hands of
his
victim?’ He walks on; he is now in his own street. Soon he can see his fence, the signboard; then the house beyond the rich foliage of August. ‘So he departed without coming to tell me goodbye. After all he has done for me. Fetched to me. Ay; given, restored, to me. It would seem that this too was reserved for me. And this must be all.’

But it is not all. There is one thing more reserved for him.

18

W
hen Byron reached town he found that he could not see the sheriff until noon, since the sheriff would be engaged all morning with the special Grand Jury. “You’ll have to wait,” they told him.

“Yes,” Byron said. “I know how.”

“Know how what?” But he did not answer. He left the sheriff’s office and stood beneath the portico which faced the south side of the square. From the shallow, flagged terrace the stone columns rose, arching, weathered, stained with generations of casual tobacco. Beneath them, steady and constant and with a grave purposelessness (and with here and there, standing motionless or talking to one another from the sides of their mouths, some youngish men, townsmen, some of whom Byron knew as clerks and young lawyers and even merchants, who had a generally identical authoritative air,
like policemen in disguise and not especially caring if the disguise hid the policeman or not) countrymen in overalls moved, with almost the air of monks in a cloister, speaking quietly among themselves of money and crops, looking quietly now and then upward at the ceiling beyond which the Grand Jury was preparing behind locked doors to take the life of a man whom few of them had ever seen to know, for having taken the life of a woman whom even fewer of them had known to see. The wagons and the dusty cars in which they had come to town were ranked about the square, and along the streets and in and out of the stores the wives and daughters who had come to town with them moved in clumps, slowly and also aimlessly as cattle or clouds. Byron stood there for quite a while, motionless, not leaning against anything—a small man who had lived in the town seven years yet whom even fewer of the country people than knew either the murderer or the murdered, knew by name or habit.

Byron was not conscious of this. He did not care now, though a week ago it would have been different. Then he would not have stood here, where any man could look at him and perhaps recognise him:
Byron Bunch, that weeded another man’s laidby crop,
without any halvers. The fellow that took care of another man’s whore while the other fellow was busy making a thousand dollars. And got nothing for it. Byron Bunch that protected her good name when the woman that owned the good name and the man she had given it to had both thrown it away, that got the other fellow’s bastard born in peace and quiet and at Byron Bunch’s expense, and heard a baby cry once for his pay. Got nothing for it except permission to fetch the other fellow back to her soon as he got done collecting the thousand dollars and Byron
wasn’t needed any more. Byron Bunch
   ‘And now I can go away,’ he thought. He began to breathe deep. He could feel himself breathing deep, as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen, and that all the time he could look down at himself breathing, at his chest, and see no movement at all, like when dynamite first begins, gathers itself for the now Now NOW, the shape of the outside of the stick does not change; that the people who passed and looked at him could see no change: a small man you would not look at twice, that you would never believe he had done what he had done and felt what he had felt, who had believed that out there at the mill on a Saturday afternoon, alone, the chance to be hurt could not have found him.

He was walking, among the people. ‘I got to go somewhere,’ he thought. He could walk in time to that: ‘I got to go somewhere.’ That would get him along. He was still saying it when he reached the boardinghouse. His room faced the street. Before he realised that he had begun to look toward it, he was looking away. ‘I might see somebody reading or smoking in the window,’ he thought. He entered the hall. After the bright morning, he could not see at once. He could smell wet linoleum, soap. ‘It’s still Monday,’ he thought. ‘I had forgot that. Maybe it’s next Monday. That’s what it seems like it ought to be.’ He did not call. After a while he could see better. He could hear the mop in the back of the hall or maybe the kitchen. Then against the rectangle of light which was the rear door, also open, he saw Mrs Beard’s head leaning out, then her body in full silhouette, advancing up the hall.

“Well,” she said. “It’s Mister Byron Bunch. Mister Byron Bunch.”

“Yessum,” he said, thinking, ‘Only a fat lady that never had much more trouble than a mopping pail would hold ought not to try to be…….’ Again he could not think of the word that Hightower would know, would use without having to think of it. ‘It’s like I not only cant do anything without getting him mixed up in it, I cant even think without him to help me out.’——“Yessum,” he said. And then he stood there, not even able to tell her that he had come to say goodbye. ‘Maybe I aint,’ he thought. ‘I reckon when a fellow has lived in one room for seven years, he aint going to get moved in one day. Only I reckon that aint going to interfere with her renting out his room.’——“I reckon I owe you a little room rent,” he said.

She looked at him: a hard, comfortable face, not unkind either. “Rent for what?” she said. “I thought you was settled. Decided to tent for the summer.” She looked at him. Then she told him. She did it gently, delicately, considering. “I done already collected the rent for that room.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. I see. Yes.” He looked quietly up the scoured, linoleumstripped stairway, scuffed bare by the aid of his own feet. When the new linoleum was put down three years ago, he had been the first of the boarders to mount upon it. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I reckon I better——”

She answered that too, immediately, not unkind. “I tended to that. I put everything you left in your grip. It’s back in my room. If you want to go up and look for yourself, though?”

“No. I reckon you got every……. Well, I reckon I…….”

She was watching him. “You men,” she said. “It aint a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You cant even know your own limits for devilment. Which aint more than I can measure on a pin, at that. I reckon if it wasn’t for getting some woman mixed up in it to help you, you’d ever one of you be drug hollering into heaven before you was ten years old.”

“I reckon you aint got any call to say anything against her,” he said.

“No more I aint. I dont need to. Dont no other woman need to that is going to. I aint saying that it aint been women that has done most of the talking. But if you had more than mansense you would know that women dont mean anything when they talk. It’s menfolks that take talking serious. It aint any woman that believes hard against you and her. Because it aint any woman but knows that she aint had any reason to have to be bad with you, even discounting that baby. Or any other man right now. She never had to. Aint you and that preacher and ever other man that knows about her, already done everything for her that she could think to want? What does she need to be bad for? Tell me that.”

“Yes,” Byron says. He was not looking at her now. “I just come…….”

She answered that too, before it was spoken. “I reckon you’ll be leaving us soon.” She was watching him. “What have they done this morning? at the courthouse?”

“I dont know. They aint finished yet.”

“I bound that, too. They’ll take as much time and trouble and county money as they can cleaning up what us women could have cleaned up in ten minutes Saturday night. For being such a fool. Not that Jefferson will miss him. Cant get along without him. But being fool enough to believe that killing a woman will do a man anymore good than killing a man would a woman.… I reckon they’ll let the other one go, now.”

“Yessum. I reckon so.”

“And they believed for a while that he helped do it. And so they will give him that thousand dollars to show it aint any hard feelings. And then they can get married. That’s about right, aint it?”

“Yessum.” He could feel her watching him, not unkindly.

“And so I reckon you’ll be leaving us. I reckon you kind of feel like you have wore out Jefferson, dont you?”

“Something like that. I reckon I’ll move on.”

“Well, Jefferson’s a good town. But it aint so good but what a footloose man like you can find in another one enough devilment and trouble to keep him occupied too.… You can leave your grip here until you are ready for it, if you want.”

He waited until noon and after. He waited until he believed that the sheriff had finished his dinner. Then he went to the sheriff’s home. He would not come in. He waited at the door until the sheriff came out—the fat man, with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face. They went aside, into the shade of a tree in the yard. There was no seat there; neither did they squat on their heels, as by
ordinary (they were both countrybred) they would have done. The sheriff listened quietly to the man, the quiet little man who for seven years had been a minor mystery to the town and who had been for seven days wellnigh a public outrage and affront.