If there had been love once, man or woman would have said that Byron Bunch had forgotten her. Or she (meaning love) him, more like—that small man who will not see thirty again, who his spent six days of every week for seven years at the planing mill, feeding boards into the machinery. Saturday afternoons too he spends there, alone now, with the other workmen all down town in their Sunday clothes and neckties, in that terrific and aimless and restive idleness of men who labor.
On these Saturday afternoons he loads the finished boards into freight cars, since he cannot operate the planer alone, keeping his own time to the final second of an imaginary whistle. The other workmen, the town itself or that part of it which remembers or thinks about him, believe that he does it for the overtime which he receives. Perhaps this is the reason. Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing. In fact, there is but one man in the town who could speak with any certainty about Bunch, and with this man the town does not know that Bunch has any intercourse, since they meet and talk only at night. This man’s name is Hightower. Twenty-five years ago he was minister of one of the principal churches, perhaps the principal church. This man alone knows where Bunch goes each Saturday evening when the imaginary whistle blows (or when Bunch’s huge silver watch says that it has blown). Mrs. Beard, at whose boarding house Bunch lives, knows only that shortly after six o’clock each Saturday Bunch enters, bathes and changes to a suit of cheap serge which is not new, eats his supper and saddles the mule which he stables in a shed behind the house which Bunch himself patched up and roofed, and departs on the mule. She does not know where he goes. It is the minister Hightower alone who knows that Bunch rides thirty miles into the country and spends Sunday leading the choir in a country church—a service which lasts all day long. Then some time around midnight he saddles the mule again and rides back to Jefferson at a steady, allnight jog. And on Monday morning, in his clean overalls and shirt he will be on hand at the mill when the whistle blows. Mrs. Beard knows only that from Saturday’s supper to Monday’s breakfast each week his room and the mule’s homemade stable will be vacant. Hightower alone knows where he goes and what he does there, because two or three nights a week Bunch visits Hightower in the small house where the ex-minister lives alone, in what the town calls his disgrace—the house unpainted, small, obscure, poorly lighted, mansmelling, manstale. Here the two of them sit in the minister’s study, talking quietly: the slight, nondescript man who is utterly unaware that he is a man of mystery among his fellow workers, and the fifty-year-old outcast who has been denied by his church.
Then Byron fell in love. He fell in love contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising which demands in the object physical inviolability. It happens on a Saturday afternoon while he is alone at the mill. Two miles away the house is still burning, the yellow smoke standing straight as a monument on the horizon. They saw it before noon, when the smoke first rose above the trees, before the whistle blew and the others departed. “I reckon Byron’ll quit too, today,” they said. “With a free fire to watch.”
“It’s a big fire,” another said. “What can it be? I don’t remember anything out that way big enough to make all that smoke except that Burden house.”
“Maybe that’s what it is,” another said. “My pappy says he can remember how fifty years ago folks said it ought to be burned, and with a little human fat meat to start it good.”
“Maybe your pappy slipped out there and set it afire,” a third said. They laughed. Then they went back to work, waiting for the whistle, pausing now and then to look at the smoke. After a while a truck loaded with logs drove in. They asked the truck driver, who had come through town.
“Burden,” the driver said. “Yes. That’s the name. Somebody in town said that the sheriff had gone out there too.”
“Well, I reckon Watt Kennedy likes to watch a fire, even if he does have to take that badge with him,” one said.
“From the way the square looks,” the driver said, “he won’t have much trouble finding anybody he wants out there to arrest.”
The noon whistle blew. The others departed. Byron ate lunch, the silver watch open beside him. When it said one o’clock, he went back to work. He was alone in the loading shed, making his steady and interminable journeys between the shed and the car, with a piece of folded tow sack upon his shoulder for a pad and bearing upon the pad stacked burdens of staves which another would have said he cold not raise nor carry, when Lena Grove walked into the door behind him, her face already shaped with serene anticipatory smiling, her mouth already shaped upon a name. He hears her and turns and sees her face fade like the dying agitation of a dropped pebble in a spring.
“You ain’t him,” she says behind her fading smile, with the grave astonishment of a child.
“No, ma’am,” Byron says. He pauses, half turning with the balanced staves. “I don’t reckon I am. Who is it I ain’t?”
“Lucas Burch. They told me—”
“Lucas Burch?”
“They told me I would find him out here.” She speaks with a kind of serene suspicion, watching him without blinking, as if she believes that he is trying to trick her. “When I got close to town they kept a-calling it Bunch instead of Burch. But I just thought they was saying it wrong. Or maybe I just heard it wrong.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “That’s what it is: Bunch. Byron Bunch.” With the staves still balanced on his shoulder he looks at her, at her swollen body, her heavy loins, at the red dust upon the man’s heavy shoes upon her feet. “Are you Miz Burch?”
She does not answer at once. She stands there just inside the door, watching him intently but without alarm, with that untroubled, faintly baffled, faintly suspicious gaze. Her eyes are quite blue. But in them is that shadow of the belief that he is trying to deceive her. “They told me away back on the road that Lucas is working at the planing mill in Jefferson. Lots of them told me. And I got to Jefferson and they told me where the planing mill was, and I asked in town about Lucas Burch and they said, ‘Maybe you mean Bunch’; and so I thought they had just got the name wrong and so it wouldn’t make any difference. Even when they told me the man they meant wasn’t dark complected. You ain’t telling me you don’t know Lucas Burch out here.”
Byron puts down the load of staves, in a neat stack, ready to be taken up again. “No, ma’am. Not out here. Not no Lucas Burch out here. And I know all the folks that work here. He may work somewhere in town. Or at another mill.”
“Is there another planing mill?”
“No, ma’am. There’s some sawmills, a right smart of them, though.”
She watches him. “They told me back down the road that he worked for the planing mill.”
“I don’t know of any here by that name,” Byron says. “I don’t recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch.”
She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now. Then she breathes. It is not a sigh: she just breathes deeply and quietly once. “Well,” she says. She half turns and glances about, at the sawn boards, the stacked staves. “I reckon I’ll set down a while. It’s right tiring, walking over them hard streets from town. It seems like walking out here from town tired me more than all that way from Alabama did.” She is moving toward a low stack of planks.
“Wait,” Byron says. He almost springs forward, slipping the sack pad from his shoulder. The woman arrests herself in the act of sitting and Byron spreads the sack on the planks. “You’ll set easier.”