They stand just without the door to the lighted room. Hightower sees now that Byron’s arms are laden with bundles, parcels that look like they might contain groceries. “What?” Hightower says. “What have you come to tell me?—But come in. Maybe I do know what it is already. But I want to see your face when you tell me. I forewarn you too, Byron.” They enter the lighted room. The bundles are groceries: he has bought and carried too many like them himself not to know. “Sit down,” he says.
“No,” Byron says. “I aint going to stay that long.” He stands, sober, contained, with that air compassionate still, but decisive without being assured, confident without being assertive: that air of a man about to do something which someone dear to him will not understand and approve, yet which he himself knows to be right just as he knows that the friend will never see it so. He says: “You aint going to like it. But there aint anything else to do. I wish you could see it so. But I reckon you cant. And I reckon that’s all there is to it.”
Across the desk, seated again, Hightower watches him gravely. “What have you done, Byron?”
Byron speaks in that new voice: that voice brief, terse, each word definite of meaning, not fumbling. “I took her out there this evening. I had already fixed up the cabin, cleaned it good. She is settled now. She wanted it so. It was the nearest thing to a home he ever had and ever will have, so I reckon she is entitled to use it, especially as the owner aint using it now. Being detained elsewhere, you might say. I know you aint going to like it. You can name lots of reasons, good ones. You’ll say it aint his cabin to give to her. All right. Maybe it aint. But it aint any living man or woman in this country or state to say she cant use it. You’ll say that in her shape she ought to have a woman with her.
All right. There is a nigger woman, one old enough to be sensible, that dont live over two hundred yards away. She can call to her without getting up from the chair or the bed. You’ll say, but that aint a white woman. And I’ll ask you what will she be getting from the white women in Jefferson about the time that baby is due, when here she aint been in Jefferson but a week and already she cant talk to a woman ten minutes before that woman knows she aint married yet, and as long as that durn scoundrel stays above ground where she can hear of him now and then, she aint going to be married. How much help will she be getting from the white ladies about that time? They’ll see that she has a bed to lay on and walls to hide her from the street all right. I dont mean that.
And I reckon a man would be justified in saying she dont deserve no more than that, being as it wasn’t behind no walls that she got in the shape she is in. But that baby never done the choosing. And even if it had, I be durn if any poor little tyke, having to face what it will have to face in this world, deserves—deserves more than—better than— But I reckon you know what I mean. I reckon you can even say it.” Beyond the desk Hightower watches him while he talks in that level, restrained tone, not once at a loss for words until he came to something still too new and nebulous for him to more than feel. “And for the third reason. A white woman out there alone. You aint going to like that. You will like that least of all.”
“Ah, Byron, Byron.”
Byron’s voice is now dogged. Yet he holds his head up still. “I aint in the house with her. I got a tent. It aint close, neither. Just where I can hear her at need. And I fixed a bolt on the door. Any of them can come out, at any time, and see me in the tent.”
“Ah, Byron, Byron.”
“I know you aint thinking what most of them think. Are thinking. I know you would know better, even if she wasn’t—if it wasn’t for—I know you said that because of what you know that the others will think.”
Hightower sits again in the attitude of the eastern idol, between his parallel arms on the armrests of the chair. “Go away, Byron. Go away. Now. At once. Leave this place forever, this terrible place, this terrible, terrible place. I can read you. You will tell me that you have just learned love; I will tell you that you have just learned hope. That’s all; hope. The object does not matter, not to the hope, not even to you. There is but one end to this, to the road that you are taking: sin or marriage.
And you would refuse the sin. That’s it, God forgive me. It will, must be, marriage or nothing with you. And you will insist that it be marriage. You will convince her; perhaps you already have, if she but knew it, would admit it: else, why is she content to stay here and yet make no effort to see the man whom she has come to find? I cannot say to you, Choose the sin, because you would not only hate me: you would carry that hatred straight to her. So I say, Go away. Now. At once. Turn your face now, and dont look back. But not this, Byron.”
They look at one another. “I knew you would not like it,” Byron says. “I reckon I done right not to make myself a guest by sitting down. But I did not expect this. That you too would turn against a woman wronged and betrayed—”
“No woman who has a child is ever betrayed; the husband of a mother, whether he be the father or not, is already a cuckold. Give yourself at least the one chance in ten, Byron. If you must marry, there are single women, girls, virgins. It’s not fair that you should sacrifice yourself to a woman who has chosen once and now wishes to renege that choice. It’s not right. It’s not just. God didn’t intend it so when He made marriage. Made it? Women made marriage.”
“Sacrifice? Me the sacrifice? It seems to me the sacrifice—”
“Not to her. For the Lena Groves there are always two men in the world and their number is legion: Lucas Burches and Byron Bunches. But no Lena, no woman, deserves more than one of them. No woman. There have been good women who were martyrs to brutes, in their cups and such. But what woman, good or bad, has ever suffered from any brute as men have suffered from good women? Tell me that, Byron.”
They speak quietly, without heat, giving pause to weigh one another’s words, as two men already impregnable each in his own conviction will. “I reckon you are right,” Byron says. “Anyway, it aint for me to say that you are wrong. And I dont reckon it’s for you to say that I am wrong, even if I am.”
“No,” Hightower says.
“Even if I am,” Byron says. “So I reckon I’ll say good night.” He says, quietly: “It’s a good long walk out there.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. “I used to walk it myself, now and then. It must be about three miles.”
“Two miles,” Byron says. “Well.” He turns. Hightower does not move. Byron shifts the parcels which he has not put down. “I’ll say good night,” he says, moving toward the door. “I reckon I’ll see you, sometime soon.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. “Is there anything I can do? Anything you need? bedclothes and such?”
“I’m obliged. I reckon she has a plenty. There was some already there. I’m obliged.”
“And you will let me know? If anything comes up. If the child— Have you arranged for a doctor?”
“I’ll get that attended to.”
“But have you seen one yet? Have you engaged one?”
“I aim to see to all that. And I’ll let you know.”
Then he is gone. From the window again Hightower watches him pass and go on up the street, toward the edge of town and his two-mile walk, carrying his paperwrapped packages of food. He passed from sight walking erect and at a good gait; such a gait as an old man already gone to flesh and short wind, an old man who has already spent too much time sitting down, could not have kept up with. And Hightower leans there in the window, in the August heat, oblivious of the odor in which he lives—that smell of people who no longer live in life: that odor of overplump desiccation and stale linen as though a precursor of the tomb—listening to the feet which he seems to hear still long after he knows that he cannot, thinking, ‘God bless him. God help him’; thinking To be young. To be young.
There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world He is thinking quietly: ‘I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.’ Then he hears the feet no longer. He hears now only the myriad and interminable insects, leaning in the window, breathing the hot still rich maculate smell of the earth, thinking of how when he was young, a youth, he had loved darkness, of walking or sitting alone among trees at night. Then the
