“Nonsense,” Hightower says. He looks across the desk at the other’s still, stubborn, ascetic face: the face of a hermit who has lived for a long time in an empty place where sand blows. “The thing, the only thing, for her to do is to go back to Alabama. To her people.”
“I reckon not,” Byron says. He says it immediately, with immediate finality, as if he has been waiting all the while for this to be said. “She wont need to do that. I reckon she wont need to do that.” But he does not look up. He can feel the other looking at him.
“Does Bu—Brown know that she is in Jefferson?”
For an instant Byron almost smiles. His lip lifts: a thin movement almost a shadow, without mirth. “He’s been too busy. After that thousand dollars. It’s right funny to watch him. Like a man that cant play a tune, blowing a horn right loud, hoping that in a minute it will begin to make music. Being drug across the square on a handcuff every twelve or fifteen hours, when likely they couldn’t run him away if they was to sick them bloodhounds on him. He spent Saturday night in jail, still talking about how they were trying to beat him out of his thousand dollars by trying to make out that he helped Christmas do the killing, until at last Buck Conner went up to his cell and told him he would put a gag in his mouth if he didn’t shut up and let the other prisoners sleep. And he shut up, and Sunday night they went out with the dogs and he raised so much racket that they had to take him out of jail and let him go too.
But the dogs never got started. And him hollering and cussing the dogs and wanting to beat them because they never struck a trail, telling everybody again how it was him that reported Christmas first and that all he wanted was fair justice, until the sheriff took him aside and talked to him. They didn’t know what the sheriff said to him. Maybe he threatened to lock him back up in jail and not let him go with them next time. Anyway, he calmed down some, and they went on. They never got back to town until late Monday night. He was still quiet. Maybe he was wore out.
He hadn’t slept none in some time, and they said how he was trying to outrun the dogs so that the sheriff finally threatened to handcuff him to a deputy to keep him back so the dogs could smell something beside him. He needed a shave already when they locked him up Saturday night, and he needed one bad by now. I reckon he must have looked more like a murderer than even Christmas. And he was cussing Christmas now, like Christmas had done hid out just for meanness, to spite him and keep him from getting that thousand dollars. And they brought him back to jail and locked him up that night. And this morning they went and took him out again and they all went off with the dogs, on a new scent. Folks said they could hear him hollering and talking until they were clean out of town.”
“And she doesn’t know that, you say. You say you have kept that from her. You had rather that she knew him to be a scoundrel than a fool: is that it?”
Byron’s face is still again, not smiling now; it is quite sober. “I dont know. It was last Sunday night, after I came out to talk to you and went back home. I thought she would be asleep in bed, but she was still sitting up in the parlor, and she said, ‘What is it? What has happened here?’ And I didn’t look at her and I could feel her looking at me. I told her it was a nigger killed a white woman. I didn’t lie then. I reckon I was so glad I never had to lie then.
Because before I thought, I had done said ‘and set the house afire.’ And then it was too late. I had pointed out the smoke, and I had told her about the two fellows named Brown and Christmas that lived out there. And I could feel her watching me the same as I can you now, and she said, ‘What was the nigger’s name?’ It’s like God sees that they find out what they need to know out of men’s lying, without needing to ask. And that they dont find out what they dont need to know, without even knowing they have not found it out. And so I dont know for sure what she knows and what she dont know. Except that I have kept it from her that it was the man she is hunting for that told on the murderer and that he is in jail now except when he is out running with dogs the man that took him up and befriended him. I have kept that from her.”
“And what are you going to do now? Where does she want to move?”
“She wants to go out there and wait for him. I told her that he is away on business for the sheriff. So I didn’t lie altogether. She had already asked me where he lived and I had already told her. And she said that was the place where she belonged until he came back, because that is his house. She said that’s what he would want her to do. And I couldn’t tell her different, that that cabin is the last place in the world he would want her to ever see. She wanted to go out there as soon as I got home from the mill this evening. She had her bundle all tied up and her bonnet on, waiting for me to get home. ‘I started once to go on by myself,’ she said.
‘But I wasn’t sho I knowed the way.’ And I said ‘Yes; only it was too late today and we would go out there tomorrow, and she said, ‘It’s a hour till dark yet. It aint but two miles, is it?’ and I said to let’s wait because I would have to ask first, and she said, ‘Ask who? Aint it Lucas’s house?’ and I could feel her watching me and she said, ‘I thought you said that that was where Lucas lived,’ and she was watching me and she said, ‘Who is this preacher you keep on going to talk to about me?’ ”
“And you are going to let her go out there to live?”
“It might be best. She would be private out there, and she would be away from all the talking until this business is over.”
“You mean, she has got her mind set on it, and you wont stop her. You dont want to stop her.”
Byron does not look up. “In a way, it is his house. The nighest thing to a home of his own he will ever own, I reckon. And he is her . . .”
“Out there alone, with a child coming. The nearest house a few negro cabins a half mile away.” He watches Byron’s face.
“I have thought of that. There are ways, things that can be done . . .”
“What things? What can you do to protect her out there?”
Byron does not answer at once; he does not look up. When he speaks his voice is dogged. “There are secret things a man can do without being evil, Reverend. No matter how they might look to folks.”
“I dont think that you could do anything that would be very evil, Byron, no matter how it looked to folks. But are you going to undertake to say just how far evil extends into the appearance of evil? just where between doing and appearing evil stops?”
“No,” Byron says. Then he moves slightly; he speaks as if he too were waking: “I hope not. I reckon I am trying to do the right thing by my lights.”—‘And that,’ Hightower thinks, ‘is the first lie he ever told me. Ever told anyone, man or woman, perhaps including himself.’ He looks across the desk at the stubborn, dogged, sober face that has not yet looked at him. ‘Or maybe it is not lie yet because he does not know himself that it is so.’ He says:
“Well.” He speaks now with a kind of spurious brusqueness which, flabbyjowled and darkcaverneyed, his face belies. “That is settled, then. You’ll take her out there, to his house, and you’ll see that she is comfortable and you’ll see that she is not disturbed until this is over. And then you’ll tell that man—Bunch, Brown—that she is here.”
“And he’ll run,” Byron says. He does not look up, yet through him there seems to go a wave of exultation, of triumph, before he can curb and hide it, when it is too late to try. For the moment he does not attempt to curb it; backthrust too in his hard chair, looking for the first time at the minister, with a face confident and bold and suffused. The other meets his gaze steadily.
“Is that what you want him to do?” Hightower says. They sit so in the lamplight. Through the open window comes the hot, myriad silence of the breathless night. “Think what you are doing. You are attempting to come between man and wife.”
Byron has caught himself. His face
