Light in August (7 page)

If there had been love once, man or woman would have said that Byron Bunch had forgotten her. Or she   (meaning love)   him, more like—that small man who will not see thirty again, who has spent six days of every week for seven years at the planing mill, feeding boards into the machinery. Saturday afternoons too he spends there, alone now, with the other workmen all down town in their Sunday clothes and neckties, in that terrific and aimless and restive idleness of men who labor.

On these Saturday afternoons he loads the finished boards into freight cars, since he cannot operate the planer alone, keeping his own time to the final second of an imaginary whistle. The other workmen, the town itself or that part of it which remembers or thinks about him, believe that he does it for the overtime which he receives. Perhaps this is the reason. Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or
woman is doing. In fact, there is but one man in the town who could speak with any certainty about Bunch, and with this man the town does not know that Bunch has any intercourse, since they meet and talk only at night. This man’s name is Hightower. Twenty-five years ago he was minister of one of the principal churches, perhaps the principal church. This man alone knows where Bunch goes each Saturday evening when the imaginary whistle blows (or when Bunch’s huge silver watch says that it has blown). Mrs Beard, at whose boarding house Bunch lives, knows only that shortly after six oclock each Saturday Bunch enters, bathes and changes to a suit of cheap serge which is not new, eats his supper and saddles the mule which he stables in a shed behind the house which Bunch himself patched up and roofed, and departs on the mule. She does not know where he goes. It is the minister Hightower alone who knows that Bunch rides thirty miles into the country and spends Sunday leading the choir in a country church—a service which lasts all day long. Then some time around midnight he saddles the mule again and rides back to Jefferson at a steady, allnight jog. And on Monday morning, in his clean overalls and shirt he will be on hand at the mill when the whistle blows. Mrs Beard knows only that from Saturday’s supper to Monday’s breakfast each week his room and the mule’s homemade stable will be vacant. Hightower alone knows where he goes and what he does there, because two or three nights a week Bunch visits Hightower in the small house where the exminister lives alone, in what the town calls his disgrace—the house unpainted, small, obscure, poorly lighted, mansmelling, man-stale. Here the two of them sit in the minister’s study, talking
quietly: the slight, nondescript man who is utterly unaware that he is a man of mystery among his fellow workers, and the fifty-year-old outcast who has been denied by his church.

Then Byron fell in love. He fell in love contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising which demands in the object physical inviolability. It happens on a Saturday afternoon while he is alone at the mill. Two miles away the house is still burning, the yellow smoke standing straight as a monument on the horizon. They saw it before noon, when the smoke first rose above the trees, before the whistle blew and the others departed. “I reckon Byron’ll quit too, today,” they said. “With a free fire to watch.”

“It’s a big fire,” another said. “What can it be? I dont remember anything out that way big enough to make all that smoke except that Burden house.”

“Maybe that’s what it is,” another said. “My pappy says he can remember how fifty years ago folks said it ought to be burned, and with a little human fat meat to start it good.”

“Maybe your pappy slipped out there and set it afire,” a third said. They laughed. Then they went back to work, waiting for the whistle, pausing now and then to look at the smoke. After a while a truck loaded with logs drove in. They asked the truck driver, who had come through town.

“Burden,” the driver said. “Yes. That’s the name. Somebody in town said that the sheriff had gone out there too.”

“Well, I reckon Watt Kennedy likes to watch a fire, even if he does have to take that badge with him,” one said.

“From the way the square looks,” the driver said, “he wont have much trouble finding anybody he wants out there to arrest.”

The noon whistle blew. The others departed. Byron ate his lunch, the silver watch open beside him. When it said one oclock, he went back to work. He was alone in the loading shed, making his steady and interminable journeys between the shed and the car, with a piece of folded tow sack upon his shoulder for a pad and bearing upon the pad stacked burdens of staves which another would have said he could not raise nor carry, when Lena Grove walked into the door behind him, her face already shaped with serene anticipatory smiling, her mouth already shaped upon a name. He hears her and turns and sees her face fade like the dying agitation of a dropped pebble in a spring.

“You aint him,” she says behind her fading smile, with the grave astonishment of a child.

“No ma’am,” Byron says. He pauses, half turning with the balanced staves. “I dont reckon I am. Who is it I aint?”

“Lucas Burch. They told me——”

“Lucas Burch?”

“They told me I would find him out here.” She speaks with a kind of serene suspicion, watching him without blinking, as if she believes that he is trying to trick her. “When I got close to town they kept a-calling it Bunch instead of Burch. But I just thought they was saying it wrong. Or maybe I just heard it wrong.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “That’s what it is: Bunch. Byron Bunch.” With the staves still balanced on his shoulder he looks at her, at her swollen body, her heavy loins, at the red dust upon the man’s heavy shoes upon her feet. “Are you Miz Burch?”

She does not answer at once. She stands there just inside
the door, watching him intently but without alarm, with that untroubled, faintly baffled, faintly suspicious gaze. Her eyes are quite blue. But in them is that shadow of the belief that he is trying to deceive her. “They told me away back on the road that Lucas is working at the planing mill in Jefferson. Lots of them told me. And I got to Jefferson and they told me where the planing mill was, and I asked in town about Lucas Burch and they said ‘Maybe you mean Bunch’ and so I thought they had just got the name wrong and so it wouldn’t make any difference. Even when they told me the man they meant wasn’t dark complected. You aint telling me you dont know Lucas Burch out here.”

Byron puts down the load of staves, in a neat stack, ready to be taken up again. “No, ma’am. Not out here. Not no Lucas Burch out here. And I know all the folks that work here. He may work somewhere in town. Or at another mill.”

“Is there another planing mill?”

“No, ma’am. There’s some saw mills, a right smart of them, though.”

She watches him. “They told me back down the road that he worked for the planing mill.”

“I dont know of any here by that name,” Byron says. “I dont recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch.”

She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now. Then she breathes. It is not a sigh: she just breathes deeply and quietly once. “Well,” she says. She half turns and glances about, at the sawn boards, the stacked staves. “I reckon I’ll set down a while. It’s right tiring, walking over them hard
streets from town. It seems like walking out here from town tired me more than all that way from Alabama did.” She is moving toward a low stack of planks.

“Wait,” Byron says. He almost springs forward, slipping the sack pad from his shoulder. The woman arrests herself in the act of sitting and Byron spreads the sack on the planks. “You’ll set easier.”

“Why, you’re right kind.” She sits down.

“I reckon it’ll set a little easier,” Byron says. He takes from his pocket the silver watch and looks at it; then he too sits, at the other end of the stack of lumber. “I reckon five minutes will be about right.”

“Five minutes to rest?” she says.

“Five minutes from when you come in. It looks like I done already started resting. I keep my own time on Saturday evenings,” he says.

“And every time you stop for a minute, you keep a count of it? How will they know you stopped? A few minutes wouldn’t make no difference, would it?”

“I reckon I aint paid for setting down,” he says. “So you come from Alabama.”

She tells him, in his turn, sitting on the towsack pad, heavybodied, her face quiet and tranquil, and he watching her as quietly; telling him more than she knows that she is telling, as she has been doing now to the strange faces among whom she has travelled for four weeks with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season. And Byron in his turn gets the picture of a young woman betrayed and deserted and not even aware that she has been deserted, and whose name is not yet Burch.

“No, I dont reckon I know him,” he says at last. “There
aint anybody but me out here this evening, anyway. The rest of them are all out yonder at that fire, more than like.” He shows her the yellow pillar of smoke standing tall and windless above the trees.

“We could see it from the wagon before we got to town,” she says. “It’s a right big fire.”

“It’s a right big old house. It’s been there a long time. Dont nobody live in it but one lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town will call it a judgment on her, even now. She is a Yankee. Her folks come down here in the Reconstruction, to stir up the niggers. Two of them got killed doing it. They say she is still mixed up with niggers. Visits them when they are sick, like they was white. Wont have a cook because it would have to be a nigger cook. Folks say she claims that niggers are the same as white folks. That’s why folks dont never go out there. Except one.” She is watching him, listening. Now he does not look at her, looking a little aside. “Or maybe two, from what I hear. I hope they was out there in time to help her move her furniture out. Maybe they was.”

“Maybe who was?”

“Two fellows named Joe that live out that way somewhere. Joe Christmas and Joe Brown.”

“Joe Christmas? That’s a funny name.”

“He’s a funny fellow.” Again he looks a little aside from her interested face. “His partner’s a sight, too. Brown. He used to work here too. But they done quit now, both of them. Which aint nobody’s loss, I reckon.”

The woman sits on the towsack pad, interested, tranquil. The two of them might be sitting in their Sunday clothes,
in splint chairs on the patinasmooth earth before a country cabin on a sabbath afternoon. “Is his partner named Joe too?”

“Yes, ma’am. Joe Brown. But I reckon that may be his right name. Because when you think of a fellow named Joe Brown, you think of a bigmouthed fellow that’s always laughing and talking loud. And so I reckon that is his right name, even if Joe Brown does seem a little kind of too quick and too easy for a natural name, somehow. But I reckon it is his, all right. Because if he drew time on his mouth, he would be owning this here mill right this minute. Folks seem to like him, though. Him and Christmas get along, anyway.”

She is watching him. Her face is still serene, but now it is quite grave, her eyes quite grave and quite intent. “What do him and the other one do?”

“Nothing they hadn’t ought to, I reckon. At least, they aint been caught at it yet. Brown used to work here, some; what time he had off from laughing and playing jokes on folks. But Christmas has retired. They live out yonder together, out there somewhere where that house is burning. And I have heard what they do to make a living. But that aint none of my business in the first place. And in the second place, most of what folks tells on other folks aint true to begin with. And so I reckon I aint no better than nobody else.”

She is watching him. She is not even blinking. “And he says his name is Brown.” It might have been a question, but she does not wait for an answer. “What kind of tales have you heard about what they do?”

“I would injure no man,” Byron says. “I reckon I ought
not to talked so much. For a fact, it looks like a fellow is bound to get into mischief soon as he quits working.”

“What kind of tales?” she says. She has not moved. Her tone is quiet, but Byron is already in love, though he does not yet know it. He does not look at her, feeling her grave, intent gaze upon his face, his mouth.

“Some claim they are selling whiskey. Keeping it hid out there where that house is burning. And there is some tale about Brown was drunk down town one Saturday night and he pretty near told something that ought not to been told, about him and Christmas in Memphis one night, or on a dark road close to Memphis, that had a pistol in it. Maybe two pistols. Because Christmas come in quick and shut Brown up and took him away. Something that Christmas didn’t want told, anyway, and that even Brown would have had better sense than to told if he hadn’t been drunk. That’s what I heard. I wasn’t there, myself.” When he raises his face now he finds that he has looked down again before he even met her eyes. He seems to have already a foreknowledge of something now irrevocable, not to be recalled, who had believed that out here at the mill alone on Saturday afternoon he would be where the chance to do hurt or harm could not have found him.

“What does he look like?” she says.

“Christmas? Why——”

“I dont mean Christmas.”

“Oh. Brown. Yes. Tall, young. Dark complected; womenfolks calls him handsome, a right smart do, I hear tell. A big hand for laughing and frolicking and playing jokes on
folks. But I…….” His voice ceases. He cannot look at her, feeling her steady, sober gaze upon his face.

“Joe Brown,” she says. “Has he got a little white scar right here by his mouth?”

And he cannot look at her, and he sits there on the stacked lumber when it is too late, and he could have bitten his tongue in two.

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