And so it is not for me to outrage their believing nor for Byron Bunch to say that they are wrong. Because all that any man can hope for is to be permitted to live quietly among his fellows.” That was soon after Byron had heard the story, shortly after the evening visits to Hightower’s study began and Byron still wondered why the other remained in Jefferson, almost within sight of, and within hearing of, the church which had disowned and expelled him. One evening Byron asked him.
“Why do you spend your Saturday afternoons working at the mill while other men are taking pleasure downtown?” Hightower said.
“I dont know,” Byron said. “I reckon that’s just my life.”
“And I reckon this is just my life, too,” the other said. ‘But I know now why it is,’ Byron thinks. ‘It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.’
They have thundered past now and crashed silently on into the dusk; night has fully come. Yet he still sits at the study window, the room still dark behind him. The street lamp at the corner flickers and glares, so that the bitten shadows of the unwinded maples seem to toss faintly upon the August darkness. From a distance, quite faint though quite clear, he can hear the sonorous waves of massed voices from the church: a sound at once austere and rich, abject and proud, swelling and falling in the quiet summer darkness like a harmonic tide.
Then he sees a man approaching along the street. On a week night he would have recognised the figure, the shape, the carriage and gait. But on Sunday evening, and with the echo of the phantom hooves still crashing soundlessly in the duskfilled study, he watches quietly the puny, unhorsed figure moving with that precarious and meretricious cleverness of animals balanced on their hinder legs; that cleverness of which the man animal is so fatuously proud and which constantly betrays him by means of natural laws like gravity and ice, and by the very extraneous objects which he has himself invented, like motor cars and furniture in the dark, and the very refuse of his own eating left upon floor or pavement; and he thinks quietly how right the ancients were in making the horse an attribute and symbol of warriors and kings, when he sees the man in the street pass the low sign and turn into his gate and approach the house. He sits forward then, watching the man come up the dark walk toward the dark door; he hears the man stumble heavily at the dark bottom step. “Byron Bunch,” he says. “In town on Sunday night. Byron Bunch in town on Sunday.”
Chapter 4
They sit facing one another across the desk. The study is lighted now, by a greenshaded reading lamp sitting upon the desk. Hightower sits behind it, in an ancient swivel chair, Byron in a straight chair opposite. Both their faces are just without the direct downward pool of light from the shaded lamp. Through the open window the sound of singing from the distant church comes. Byron talks in a flat, level voice.
“It was a strange thing. I thought that if there ever was a place where a man would be where the chance to do harm could not have found him, it would have been out there at the mill on a Saturday evening. And with the house burning too, right in my face, you might say. It was like all the time I was eating dinner and I would look up now and then and see that smoke and I would think, ‘Well, I wont see a soul out here this evening, anyway. I aint going to be interrupted this evening, at least.’
And then I looked up and there she was, with her face all fixed for smiling and with her mouth all fixed to say his name, when she saw that I wasn’t him. And I never knowed any better than to blab the whole thing.” He grimaces faintly. It is not a smile. His upper lip just lifts momentarily, the movement, even the surface wrinkling, travelling no further and vanishing almost at once. “I never even suspicioned then that what I didn’t know was not the worst of it.”
“It must have been a strange thing that could keep Byron Bunch in Jefferson over Sunday,” Hightower says. “But she was looking for him. And you helped her to find him. Wasn’t what you did what she wanted, what she had come all the way from Alabama to find?”
“I reckon I told her, all right. I reckon it aint any question about that. With her watching me, sitting there, swole-bellied, watching me with them eyes that a man could not have lied to if he had wanted. And me blabbing on, with that smoke right yonder in plain sight like it was put there to warn me, to make me watch my mouth only I never had the sense to see it.”
“Oh,” Hightower says. “The house that burned yesterday. But I dont see any connection between— Whose house was it? I saw the smoke, myself, and I asked a passing negro, but he didn’t know.”
“That old Burden house,” Byron says. He looks at the other. They look at one another. Hightower is a tall man, and he was thin once. But he is not thin now. His skin is the color of flour sacking and his upper body in shape is like a loosely filled sack falling from his gaunt shoulders of its own weight, upon his lap. Then Byron says, “You aint heard yet.” The other watches him. He says in a musing tone: “That would be for me to do too. To tell on two days to two folks something they aint going to want to hear and that they hadn’t ought to have to hear at all.”
“What is this that you think I will not want to hear? What is it that I have not heard?”
“Not the fire,” Byron says. “They got out of the fire all right.”
“They? I understood that Miss Burden lived there alone.”
Again Byron looks at the other for a moment. But Hightower’s face is merely grave and interested. “Brown and Christmas,” Byron says. Still Hightower’s face does not change in expression. “You aint heard that, even,” Byron says. “They lived out there.”
“Lived out there? They boarded in the house?”
“No. In a old nigger cabin in the back. Christmas fixed it up three years ago. He’s been living in it ever since, with folks wondering where he slept at night. Then when him and Brown set up together, he took Brown in with him.”
“Oh,” Hightower said. “But I dont see . . . If they were comfortable, and Miss Burden didn’t—”
“I reckon they got along. They were selling whiskey, using that old place for a headquarters, a blind. I dont reckon she knew that, about the whiskey. Leastways, folks dont know if she ever knew or not. They say that Christmas started it by himself three years ago, just selling to a few regular customers that didn’t even know one another. But when he took Brown in with him, I reckon Brown wanted to spread out. Selling it by the half a pint out of his shirt bosom in any alley and to anybody. Selling what he never drunk, that is. And I reckon the way they got the whiskey they sold would not have stood much looking into.
Because about two weeks after Brown quit out at the mill and taken to riding around in that new car for his steady work, he was downtown drunk one Saturday night and bragging to a crowd in the barbershop something about him and Christmas in Memphis one night, or on a road close to Memphis. Something about them and that new car hid in the bushes and Christmas with a pistol, and a lot more about a truck and a hundred gallons of something, until Christmas come in quick and walked up to him and jerked him out of the chair.
And Christmas saying in that quiet voice of his, that aint pleasant and aint mad either: ‘You ought to be careful about drinking so much of this Jefferson hair tonic. It’s gone to your head. First thing you know you’ll have a hairlip.’ Holding Brown up he was with one hand and slapping his face with the other. They didn’t look like hard licks. But the folks could see the red even through Brown’s whiskers when Christmas’ hand would come away between licks. ‘You come out and get some fresh air,’ Christmas says. ‘You’re keeping these folks from working.’ ” He muses. He speaks again: “And there she was, sitting there on them staves, watching me and me blabbing the whole thing to her, and her watching me. And then she says, ‘Did he have a little white scar right here by his mouth?’ ”
“And Brown is the man,” Hightower says. He sits motionless, watching Byron with a sort of quiet astonishment. There is nothing militant in it, nothing of outraged morality. It is as though he were listening to the doings of people of
