“I think I know that,” Hightower says. He watches the other’s downlooking face. ‘I am not in life anymore,’ he thinks. ‘That’s why there is no use in even trying to meddle, interfere. He could hear me no more than that man and that woman (ay, and that child) would hear or heed me if I tried to come back into life.’ “But you told me she knows that he is here.”
“Yes,” Byron says, brooding. “Out there where I thought the chance to harm ere a man or woman or child could not have found me. And she hadn’t hardly got there before I had to go and blab the whole thing.”
“I don’t mean that. You didn’t know yourself, then. I mean, the rest of it. About him and the—that … It has been three days. She must know, whether you told her or not. She must have heard by now.”
“Christmas.” Byron does not look up. “I never said any more, after she asked about that little white scar by his mouth. All the time we were coming to town that evening I was afraid she would ask. I would try to think up things to talk to her about so she would not have a chance to ask me any more. And all the time I thought I was keeping her from finding out that he had not only run off and left her in trouble, he had changed his name to keep her from finding him, and that now when she found him at last, what she had found was a bootlegger, she already knew it. Already knew that he was a nogood.” He says now, with a kind of musing astonishment: “I never even had any need to keep it from her, to lie it smooth. It was like she knew beforehand what I would say, that I was going to lie to her. Like she had already thought of that herself, and that she already didn’t believe it before I even said it, and that was all right too. But the part of her that knew the truth, that I could not have fooled anyway …” He fumbles, gropes, the unbending man beyond the desk watching him, not offering to help. “It’s like she was in two parts, and one of them knows that he is a scoundrel. But the other part believes that when a man and a woman are going to have a child, that the Lord will see that they are all together when the right time comes. Like it was God that looks after women, to protect them from men. And if the Lord don’t see fit to let them two parts meet and kind of compare, then I ain’t going to do it either.”
“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 won’t need to do that. I reckon she won’t 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 а shadow, without mirth. “He’s been too busy. After that thousand dollars. It’s right funny to watch him. Like a man that can’t 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 don’t 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 don’t find out what they don’t need to know, without even knowing they have not found it out. And so I don’t know for sure what she knows and what she don’t 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 ain’t but two miles, is it?’ and I said to let’s wait because I would have to ask first, and she said, ‘Ask who? Ain’t 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.”