say, “Well, he won’t be back on the job Monday morning.” But each Monday he was back. It was Christmas who quit first.
He quit one Saturday night, without warning, after almost three years. It was Brown who informed them that Christmas had quit. Some of the other workers were family men and some were bachelors and they were of different ages and they led a catholic variety of lives, yet on Monday morning they all came to work with a kind of gravity, almost decorum. Some of them were young, and they drank and gambled on Saturday night, and even went to Memphis now and then. Yet on Monday morning they came quietly and soberly to work, in clean overalls and clean shirts, waiting quietly until the whistle blew and then going quietly to work, as though there were still something of Sabbath in the overlingering air which established a tenet that, no matter what a man had done with his Sabbath, to come quiet and clean to work on Monday morning was no more than seemly and right to do.
That is what they had always remarked about Brown. On Monday morning as likely as not he would appear in the same soiled clothes of last week, and with a black stubble that had known no razor. And he would be more noisy than ever, shouting and playing the pranks of a child of ten. To the sober others it did not look right. To them it was as though he had arrived naked, or drunk. Hence it was Brown who on this Monday morning notified them that Christmas had quit. He arrived late, but that was not it. He hadn’t shaved, either; but that was not it. He was quiet. For a time they did not know that he was even present, who by that time should have had half the men there cursing him, and some in good earnest. He appeared just as the whistle blew and went straight to the sawdust pile and went to work without a word to anyone, even when one man spoke to him. And then they saw that he was down there alone, that Christmas, his partner, was not there. When the foreman came in, one said: “Well, I see you have lost one of your apprentice firemen.”
Mooney looked down to where Brown was spading into the sawdust pile as though it were eggs. He spat briefly. “Yes. He got rich too fast. This little old job couldn’t hold him.”
“Got rich?” another said.
“One of them did,” Mooney said, still watching Brown. “I saw them yesterday riding in a new car. He”—he jerked his head toward Brown—”was driving it. I wasn’t surprised at that. I am just surprised that even one of them come to work today.”
“Well, I don’t reckon Simms will have any trouble finding a man to fill his shoes in these times,” the other said. “He wouldn’t have any trouble doing that at any time,” Mooney said.
“It looked to me like he was doing pretty well.”
“Oh,” Mooney said. “I see. You are talking about Christmas.”
“Who were you talking about? Has Brown said he is quitting too?”
“You reckon he’s going to stay down there, working, with the other one riding around town all day in that new car?”
“Oh.” The other looked at Brown too. “I wonder where they got that car.”
“I don’t,” Mooney said. “What I wonder is, if Brown is going to quit at noon or work on until six o’clock.”
“Well,” Byron said, “if I could get rich enough out here to buy a new automobile, I’d quit too.”
One or two of the others looked at Byron. They smiled a little. “They never got that rich out here,” one said. Byron looked at him. “I reckon Byron stays out of meanness too much himself to keep up with other folks’,” the other said. They looked at Byron. “Brown is what you might call a public servant. Christmas used to make them come way out to them woods back of Miss Burden’s place, at night; now Brown brings it right into town for them. I hear tell how if you just know the pass word, you can buy a pint of whiskey out of his shirt front in any alley on a Saturday night.”
“What’s the pass word?” another said. “Six bits?”
Byron looked from face to face. “Is that a fact? Is that what they are doing?”
“That’s what Brown is doing. I don’t know about Christmas. I wouldn’t swear to it. But Brown ain’t going to be far away from where Christmas is at. Like to like, as the old folks say.”
“That’s a fact,” another said. “Whether Christmas is in it or not, I reckon we ain’t going to know. He ain’t going to walk around in public with his pants down, like Brown does.”
“He ain’t going to need to,” Mooney said, looking at Brown.
And Mooney was right. They watched Brown until noon, down there at the sawdust pile by himself. Then the whistle blew and they got their lunch pails and squatted in the pump shed and began to eat. Brown came in, glum, his face at once sullen and injured looking, like a child’s, and squatted among them, his hands dangling between his knees. He had no lunch with him today.
“Ain’t you going to eat any dinner?” one said.
“Cold muck out of a dirty lard bucket?” Brown said. “Starting in at daylight and slaving all day like a durn nigger, with a hour off at noon to eat cold muck out of a tin bucket.”
“Well, maybe some folks work like the niggers work where they come from,” Mooney said. “But a nigger wouldn’t last till the noon whistle, working on this job like some white folks work on it.”
But Brown did not seem to hear, to be listening, squatting with his sullen face and his dangling hands. It was as though he were not listening to any save himself, listening to himself: “A fool. A man is a fool that will do it.”
“You are not chained to that scoop,” Mooney said.
“You durn right I ain’t,” Brown said.
Then the whistle blew. They went back to work. They watched Brown down at the sawdust pile. He would dig for a while, then he would begin to slow, moving slower and slower until at last he would be clutching the shovel as though it were a riding whip, and they could see that he was talking to himself. “Because there ain’t nobody else down there for him to tell it to,” one said.
‘It’s not that,” Mooney said. “He hasn’t quite convinced himself yet. He ain’t quite sold yet.”
“Sold on what?”
