“And so I had already told her before I knew it. And I could have bit my tongue in two, even then, even when I thought that that was all.” He is not looking at the other now. Through the window, faint yet clear, the blended organ and voices come from the distant church, across the still evening. I wonder if he hears it too Byron thinks Or maybe he has listened to it so much and so long that he dont even hear it anymore. Dont even need to not listen “And she set there all the evening while I worked, and the smoke dying away at last, and me trying to think what to tell her and what to do. She wanted to go right on out there, for me to tell her the way. When I told her it was two miles she just kind of smiled, like I was a child or something. ‘I done come all the way from Alabama,’ she said. ‘I reckon I aint going to worry about two miles more.’
And then I told her . . .” His voice ceases. He appears to contemplate the floor at his feet. He looks up. “I lied, I reckon. Only in a way it was not a lie. It was because I knowed there would be folks out there watching the fire, and her coming up, trying to find him. I didn’t know myself, then, the other. The rest of it. The worst of it. So I told her that he was busy at a job he had, and that the best time to find him would be downtown after six o’clock. And that was the truth.
Because I reckon he does call it work, carrying all them cold little bottles nekkid against his chest, and if he ever was away from the square it was just because he was a little behind in getting back or had just stepped into a alley for a minute. So I persuaded her to wait and she set there and I went on working, trying to decide what to do. When I think now how worried I was on what little I knowed, now when I know the rest of it, it dont seem like I had anything then to worry me at all. All day I have been thinking how easy it would be if I could just turn back to yesterday and not have any more to worry me than I had then.”
“I still cannot see what you have to worry about,” Hightower says. “It is not your fault that the man is what he is or she what she is. You did what you could. All that any stranger could be expected to do. Unless . . .” His voice ceases also. Then it dies away on that inflection, as if idle thinking had become speculation and then something like concern. Opposite him Byron sits without moving, his face lowered and grave. And opposite Byron, Hightower does not yet think love. He remembers only that Byron is still young and has led a life of celibacy and hard labor, and that by Byron’s telling the woman whom he has never seen possesses some disturbing quality at least, even though Byron still believes that it is only pity. So he watches Byron now with a certain narrowness neither cold nor warm, while Byron continues in that flat voice: about how at six o’clock he had still decided on nothing; that when he and Lena reached the square he was still undecided.
And now there begins to come into Hightower’s puzzled expression a quality of shrinking and foreboding as Byron talks quietly, telling about how he decided after they reached the square to take Lena on to Mrs Beard’s. And Byron talking quietly, thinking, remembering: It was like something gone through the air, the evening, making the familiar faces of men appear strange, and he, who had not yet heard, without having to know that something had happened which made of the former dilemma of his innocence a matter for children, so that he knew before he knew what had happened, that Lena must not hear about it.
He did not even have to be told in words that he had surely found the lost Lucas Burch; it seemed to him now that only the crassest fatuousness and imbecility should have kept him unaware. It seemed to him that fate, circumstance, had set a warning in the sky all day long in that pillar of yellow smoke, and he too stupid to read it. And so he would not let them tell—the men whom they passed, the air that blew upon them full of it—lest she hear too.
Perhaps he knew at the time that she would have to know, hear, it sooner or later; that in a way it was her right to know. It just seemed to him that if he could only get her across the square and into a house his responsibility would be discharged. Not responsibility for the evil to which he held himself for no other reason than that of having spent the afternoon with her while it was happening, having been chosen by circumstance to represent Jefferson to her who had come afoot and without money for thirty days in order to reach there.
He did not hope nor intend to avoid that responsibility. It was just to give himself and her time to be shocked and surprised. He tells it quietly, fumbling, his face lowered, in his flat, inflectionless voice, while across the desk Hightower watches him with that expression of shrinking and denial.
They reached the boarding house at last and entered it. It was as though she felt foreboding too, watching him as they stood in the hall, speaking for the first time: “What is it them men were trying to tell you? What is it about that burned house?”
“It wasn’t anything,” he said, his voice sounding dry and light to him. “Just something about Miss Burden got hurt in the fire.”
“How got hurt? How bad hurt?”
“I reckon not bad. Maybe not hurt at all. Just folks talking, like as not. Like they will.” He could not look at her, meet her eyes at all. But he could feel her watching him, and he seemed to hear a myriad sounds: voices, the hushed tense voices about the town, about the square through which he had hurried her, where men met among the safe and familiar lights, telling it.
The house too seemed filled with familiar sounds, but mostly with inertia, a terrible procrastination as he gazed down the dim hall, thinking Why dont she come on. Why dont she come on Then Mrs Beard did come: a comfortable woman, with red arms and untidy grayish hair. “This here is Miz Burch,” he said.
His expression was almost a glare: importunate, urgent. “She just got to town from Alabama. She is looking to meet her husband here. He aint come yet. So I brought her here, where she can rest some before she gets mixed up in the excitement of town. She aint been in town or talked to anybody yet, and so I thought maybe you could fix her up a place to get rested some before she has to hear talking and . . .” His voice ceased, died, recapitulant, urgent, importunate. Then he believed that she had got his meaning.
Later he knew that it was not because of his asking that she refrained from telling what he knew that she had also heard, but because she had already noticed the pregnancy and that she would have kept the matter hidden anyway. She looked at Lena, once, completely, as strange women had been doing for four weeks now.
“How long does she aim to stay?” Mrs Beard said.
“Just a night or two,” Byron said. “Maybe just tonight. She’s looking to meet her husband here. She just got in, and she aint had time to ask or inquire—” His voice was still recapitulant, meaningful. Mrs Beard watched him now. He thought that she was still trying to get his meaning. But what she was doing was watching him grope, believing (or about to believe) that his fumbling had a different reason and meaning. Then she looked at Lena again. Her eyes were not exactly cold. But they were not warm.
“I reckon she aint got any business trying to go anywhere right now,” she said.
“That’s what I thought,” Byron said, quickly, eagerly. “With all the talk and excitement she might have to listen to, after not hearing no talk and excitement . . . If you are crowded tonight, I thought she might have my room.”
“Yes,” Mrs Beard said immediately. “You’ll be taking out in a few minutes, anyway. You want her to have your room until you get back Monday morning?”
“I aint going tonight,” Byron said. He did not look away. “I wont be able to go this time.” He looked straight into cold, already disbelieving eyes, watching her in turn trying to read his own, believing that she read what was there instead of what she believed was there. They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the
