“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 ain’t 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 don’t 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 don’t reckon she knew that, about the whiskey. Leastways, folks don’t 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 down town 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 ain’t pleasant and ain’t 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 a different race. “Her husband a bootlegger. Well, well, well.” Yet Byron can see in the other’s face something latent, about to wake, of which Hightower himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him. But Byron thinks that this is just the reflection of what he himself already knows and is about to tell.

“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 don’t even hear it anymore. Don’t 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 ain’t 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 down town 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 don’t 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 crassest fatuousness and imbecility should have kept unaware. It seemed to him that fate, circumstance, had 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.