And not even waiting for them to ask her about it before she begins to tell. Telling them of her own accord about that durn fellow like she never had nothing particular to either hide or tell, even when Jody Varner or some of them will tell her that that fellow in Jefferson at the planing mill is named Bunch and not Burch; and that not worrying her either. I reckon she knows more than even Martha does, like when she told Martha last night about how the Lord will see that what is right will get done.’
It required only one or two questions. Then, sitting on the top step, the fan and the bundle upon her lap, Lena tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child, the squatting overalled men listening quietly.
“That fellow’s name is Bunch,” Varner says. “He’s been working there at the mill about seven years. How do you know that Burch is there too?”
She is looking away up the road, in the direction of Jefferson. Her face is calm, waiting, a little detached without being bemused. “I reckon he’ll be there. At that planing mill and all. Lucas always did like excitement. He never did like to live quiet. That’s why it never suited him back at Doane’s Mill. Why he—we decided to make a change: for money and excitement.”
“For money and excitement,” Varner says. “Lucas aint the first young buck that’s throwed over what he was bred to do and them that depended on him doing it, for money and excitement.”
But she is not listening apparently. She sits quietly on the top step, watching the road where it curves away, empty and mounting, toward Jefferson. The squatting men along the wall look at her still and placid face and they think as Armstid thought and as Varner thinks: that she is thinking of a scoundrel who deserted her in trouble and who they believe that she will never see again, save his coattails perhaps already boardflat with running. ‘Or maybe it’s about that Sloane’s or Bone’s Mill she is thinking,’ Varner thinks.
‘I reckon that even a fool gal don’t have to come as far as Mississippi to find out that whatever place she run from ain’t going to be a whole lot different or worse than the place she is at. Even if it has got a brother in it that objects to his sister’s night-prowling,’ thinking I would have done the same as the brother; the father would have done the same. She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits
She is not thinking about this at all. She is thinking about the coins knotted in the bundle beneath her hands. She is remembering breakfast, thinking how she can enter the store this moment and buy cheese and crackers and even sardines if she likes. At Armstid’s she had had but a cup of coffee and a piece of cornbread: nothing more, though Armstid pressed her. ‘I et polite,’ she thinks, her hands lying upon the bundle, knowing the hidden coins, remembering the single cup of coffee, the decorous morsel of strange bread; thinking with a sort of serene pride: ‘Like a lady I et. Like a lady travelling. But now I can buy sardines too if I should so wish.’
So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slow-spitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives. This time she conquers. She rises and walking a little awkwardly, a little carefully, she traverses the ranked battery of maneyes and enters the store, the clerk following. ‘I’m a-going to do it,’ she thinks, even while ordering the cheese and crackers; ‘I’m a-going to do it,’ saying aloud: “And a box of sardines.” She calls them sour-deens. “A nickel box.”
“We ain’t got no nickel sardines,” the clerk says. “Sardines is fifteen cents.” He also calls them sour-deens.
She muses. “What have you got in a can for a nickel?”
“Aint got nothing except shoeblacking. I dont reckon you want that. Not to eat, noway.”
“I reckon I’ll take the fifteen cent ones, then.” She unties the bundle and the knotted sack. It requires some time to solve the knots. But she unties them patiently, one by one, and pays and knots the sack and the bundle again and takes up her purchase. When she emerges onto the porch there is a wagon standing at the steps. A man is on the seat.
“Here’s a wagon going to town,” they tell her. “He will take you in.”
Her face wakes, serene, slow, warm. “Why, you’re right kind,” she says.
The wagon moves slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny loneliness of the enormous land it were outside of, beyond all time and all haste. From Varner’s store to Jefferson it is twelve miles. “Will we get there before dinnertime?” she says.
The driver spits. “We mought,” he says.
Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon. Apparently she has never looked at him, either. She does not do so now. “I reckon you go to Jefferson a right smart.”
He says, “Some.” The wagon creaks on. Fields and woods seem to hang in some inescapable middle distance, at once static and fluid, quick, like mirages. Yet the wagon passes them.
“I reckon you don’t know anybody in Jefferson named Lucas Burch.”
“Burch?”
“I’m looking to meet him there. He works at the planing mill.”
“No,” the driver says. “I don’t know that I know him. But likely there is a right smart of folks in Jefferson I don’t know. Likely he is there.”
“I’ll declare, I hope so. Travelling is getting right bothersome.”
The driver does not look at her. “How far have you come, looking for him?”
“From Alabama. It’s a right far piece.”
He does not look at her. His voice is quite casual. “How did your folks come to let you start out, in your shape?”
“My folks are dead. I live with my brother. I just decided to come on.”
“I see. He sent you word to come to Jefferson.”
She does not answer. He can see beneath the sunbonnet her calm profile. The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels. The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap. She looks up at the sun. “I reckon it’s time to eat,” she says. He watches from the corner of his eye as she opens the cheese and crackers and the sardines and offers them.
“I wouldn’t care for none,” he says.
“I’d take it kind for you to share.”
“I wouldn’t care to. You go ahead and eat.”
She begins to eat. She eats slowly, steadily, sucking the rich sardine oil from her fingers with slow and complete relish. Then she stops, not abruptly, yet with utter completeness, her jaw stilled in midchewing, a bitten cracker in her hand and her face lowered a little and her eyes blank, as if she were listening to something very far away or so near as to be inside her. Her face has drained of color, of its full, hearty blood, and she sits quite still, hearing and feeling the implacable and immemorial earth, but without fear or alarm. ‘It’s twins at least,’ she says to herself, without lip movement, without sound. Then the spasm passes. She eats again. The wagon has not stopped; time has not stopped. The wagon crests the final hill and they see smoke.
“Jefferson,” the driver says.
“Well, I’ll declare,” she says. “We are almost there, aint we?”
It is the man now who does not hear. He is looking ahead, across the valley toward the town on the opposite ridge. Following his pointing whip, she sees two columns of smoke: the one the heavy density of burning coal above a tall stack, the other a tall yellow column standing apparently from among a clump of trees some distance beyond the town. “That’s a house burning,” the driver says. “See?”
But she in turn again does not seem to be listening, to hear. “My, my,” she says; “here I aint been on the road but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already. My, my. A body does get around.”
Chapter 2
Byron Bunch knows this: It was one Friday morning three years ago. And the group of men at work in the planer shed looked up, and saw the stranger standing there, watching them. They did not know how long he had been there. He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either. His shoes were dusty and his trousers were soiled too. But they were of decent serge, sharply creased, and his shirt was soiled but it was a white shirt, and he wore a tie and a stiffbrim straw hat that was quite new, cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face. He did not look like a professional hobo in his professional rags, but there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no
