He had done it before — taken a log from the truck on to his hands, balanced, and turned with it and tossed it on to the skidway, but never with a stick of this size, so that in a complete cessation of all sound save the pulse of the exhaust and the light free-running whine of the disengaged saw since every eye there, even that of the white foreman, was upon him, he nudged the log to the edge of the truckframe and squatted and set his palms against the underside of it. For a time there was no movement at all. It was as if the unrational and inanimate wood had invested, mesmerised the man with some of its own primal inertia. Then a voice said quietly: “He got hit.
Hit’s off de truck,” and they saw the crack and gap of air, watching the infinitesimal straightening of the braced legs until the knees locked, the movement mounting infinitesimally through the belly’s insuck, the arch of the chest, the neck cords, lifting the lip from the white clench of teeth in passing, drawing the whole head backward and only the bloodshot fixity of the eyes impervious to it, moving on up the arms and the straightening elbows until the balanced log was higher than his head.
“Only he aint gonter turn wid dat un,” the same voice said. “And when he try to put hit back on de truck hit gonter kill him.” But none of them moved. Then — there was no gathering of supreme effort — the log seemed to leap suddenly backward over his head of his own volition, spinning, crashing and thundering down the incline; he turned and stepped over the slanting track in one stride and walked through them as they gave way and went on across the clearing toward the woods even though the foreman called after him: “Rider!” and again: “You, Rider!”
At sundown he and the dog were in the river swamp four miles away — another clearing, itself not much larger than a room, a hut, a hovel partly of planks and partly of canvas, an unshaven white man standing in the door beside which a shotgun leaned, watching him as he approached, his hand extended with four silver dollars on the palm. “Ah wants a jug,” he said.
“A jug?” the white man said. “You mean a pint. This is Monday. Aint you all running this week?”
“Ah laid off,” he said. “Whar’s my jug?” waiting, looking at nothing apparently, blinking his bloodshot eyes rapidly in his high, slightly back-tilted head, then turning, the jug hanging from his crooked middle finger against his leg, at which moment the white man looked suddenly and sharply at his eyes as though seeing them for the first time — the eyes which had been strained and urgent this morning and which now seemed to be without vision too and in which no white showed at all — and said,
“Here. Gimme that jug.
You dont need no gallon. I’m going to give you that pint, give it to you. Then you get out of here and stay out. Dont come back until—” Then the white man reached and grasped the jug, whereupon the other swung it behind him, sweeping his other arm up and out so that it struck the white man across the chest.
“Look out, white folks,” he said. “Hit’s mine. Ah done paid you.”
The white man cursed him. “No you aint. Here’s your money. Put that jug down, nigger.”
“Hit’s mine,” he said, his voice quiet, gentle even, his face quiet save for the rapid blinking of the red eyes. “Ah done paid for hit,” turning on, turning his back on the man and the gun both, and recrossed the clearing to where the dog waited beside the path to come to heel again. They moved rapidly on between the close walls of impenetrable cane-stalks which gave a sort of blondness to the twilight and possessed something of that oppression, that lack of room to breathe in, which the walls of his house had had.
But this time, instead of fleeing it, he stopped and raised the jug and drew the cob stopper from the fierce duskreek of uncured alcohol and drank, gulping the liquid solid and cold as ice water, without either taste or heat until he lowered the jug and the air got in. “Hah,” he said. “Dat’s right. Try me. Try me, big boy. Ah gots something hyar now dat kin whup you.”
And, once free of the bottom’s unbreathing blackness, there was the moon again, his long shadow and that of the lifted jug slanting away as he drank and then held the jug poised, gulping the silver air into his throat until he could breathe again, speaking to the jug: “Come on now. You always claim you’s a better man den me. Come on now. Prove it.” He drank again, swallowing the chill liquid tamed of taste or heat either while the swallowing lasted, feeling it flow solid and cold with fire, past then enveloping the strong steady panting of his lungs until they too ran suddenly free as his moving body ran in the silver solid wall of air he breasted.
And he was all right, his striding shadow and the trotting one of the dog travelling swift as those of two clouds along the hill; the long cast of his motionless shadow and that of the lifted jug slanting across the slope as he watched the frail figure of his aunt’s husband toiling up the hill.
“Dey tole me at de mill you was gone,” the old man said. “Ah knowed whar to look. Come home, son. Dat ar cant help you.”
“Hit done awready hope me,” he said. “Ah’m awready home. Ah’m snakebit now and pizen cant hawm me.”
“Den stop and see her. Leff her look at you. Dat’s all she axes: just leff her look at you—” But he was already moving. “Wait!” the old man cried. “Wait!”
“You cant keep up,” he said, speaking into the silver air, breasting aside the silver solid air which began to flow past him almost as fast as it would have flowed past a moving horse. The faint frail voice was already lost in the night’s infinitude, his shadow and that of the dog scudding the free miles, the deep strong panting of his chest running free as air now because he was all right.
Then, drinking, he discovered suddenly that no more of the liquid was entering his mouth. Swallowing, it was no longer passing down his throat, his throat and mouth filled now with a solid and unmoving column which without reflex or revulsion sprang, columnar and intact and still retaining the mould of his gullet, outward glinting in the moonlight, splintering, vanishing into the myriad murmur of the dewed grass. He drank again.
Again his throat merely filled solidly until two icy rills ran from his mouth-corners; again the intact column sprang silvering, glinting, shivering, while he panted the chill of air into his throat, the jug poised before his mouth while he spoke to it: “Awright. Ah’m ghy try you again. Soon as you makes up yo mind to stay whar I puts you, Ah’ll leff you alone.” He drank, filling his gullet for the third time and lowered the jug one instant ahead of the bright intact repetition, panting, indrawing the cool of air until he could breathe.
He stoppered the cob carefully back into the jug and stood, panting, blinking, the long cast of his solitary shadow slanting away across the hill and beyond, across the mazy infinitude of all the night-bound earth. “Awright,” he said. “Ah just misread de sign wrong. Hit’s done done me all de help Ah needs. Ah’m awright now. Ah doan needs no mo of hit.”
He could see the lamp in the window as he crossed the pasture, passing the black-and-silver yawn of the sandy ditch where he had played as a boy with empty snuff-tins and rusted harness-buckles and fragments of trace-chains and now and then an actual wheel, passing the garden patch where he had hoed in the spring days while his aunt stood sentry over him from the kitchen window, crossing the grassless yard in whose dust he had sprawled and crept before he learned to walk.
He entered the house, the room, the light itself, and stopped in the door, his head back-tilted a little as if he could not see, the jug hanging from his crooked finger, against his leg. “Unc Alec say you wanter see me,” he said.
“Not just to see you,” his aunt said. “To come home, whar we kin help you.”
“Ah’m awright,” he said. “Ah doan needs no help.”
“No,” she said. She rose from the chair and came and grasped his arm as she had grasped it yesterday at the grave. Again, as on yesterday, the forearm was like iron under her hand. “No! When Alec come back and tole me how you had wawked off de mill and de sun not half down, Ah knowed why and whar.
