Light in August

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 ground, the bark of trees, became actual, savage, filled with, evocative of, strange and baleful half delights and half terrors. He was afraid of it. He feared; he loved in being afraid. Then one day while at the seminary he realised that he was no longer afraid. It was as though a door had shut somewhere. He was no longer afraid of darkness. He just hated it; he would flee from it, to walls, to artificial light. ‘Yes,’ he thinks. ‘I should never have let myself get out of the habit of prayer.’ He turns from the window. One wall of the study is lined with books. He pauses before them, seeking, until he finds the one which he wants. It is Tennyson. It is dogeared. He has had it ever since the seminary. He sits beneath the lamp and opens it. It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.

Chapter 14

“THERE’S somebody out there in that cabin,” the deputy told the sheriff. “Not hiding: living in it.”

“Go and see,” the sheriff said.

The deputy went and returned.

“It’s a woman. A young woman. And she’s all fixed up to live there a good spell, it looks like. And Byron Bunch is camped in a tent about as far from the cabin as from here to the post-office.”

“Byron Bunch?” the sheriff says. “Who is the woman?” “I don’t know. She is a stranger. A young woman. She told me all about it. She begun telling me almost before I got inside the cabin, like it was a speech. Like she had done got used to telling it, done got into the habit. And I reckon she has, coming here from over in Alabama somewhere, looking for her husband. He had done come on ahead of her to find work, it seems like, and after a while she started out after him and folks told her on the road that he was here. And about that time Byron come in and he said he could tell me about it. Said he aimed to tell you.”

“Byron Bunch,” the sheriff says.

“Yes,” the deputy says. He says: “She’s fixing to have a kid. It ain’t going to be long, neither.”

“A kid?” the sheriff says. He looks at the deputy. “And from Alabama. From anywhere. You can’t tell me that about Byron Bunch.”

“No more am I trying to,” the deputy says. “I ain’t saying it’s Byron’s. Leastways, Byron ain’t saying it’s his. I’m just telling you what he told me.”

“Oh,” the sheriff says. “I see. Why she is out there. So it’s one of them fellows. It’s Christmas, is it?”

“No. This is what Byron told me. He took me outside and told me, where she couldn’t hear. He said he aimed to come and tell you. It’s Brown’s. Only his name ain’t Brown. It’s Lucas Burch. Byron told me. About how Brown or Burch left her over in Alabama. Told her he was just coming to find work and fix up a home and then send for her. But her time come nigh and she hadn’t heard from him, where he was at or anything, so she just decided to not wait any longer. She started out afoot, asking along the road if anybody knowed a fellow named Lucas Burch, getting a ride here and there, asking everybody she met if they knew him. And so after a while somebody told her how there was a fellow named Burch or Bunch or something working at the planing mill in Jefferson, and she come on here. She got here Saturday, on a wagon, while we were all out at the murder, and she come out to the mill and found it was Bunch instead of Burch. And Byron said he told her that her husband was in Jefferson before he knew it. And then he said she had him pinned down and he had to tell her where Brown lived. But he ain’t told her that Brown or Burch is mixed up with Christmas in this killing. He just told her that Brown was away on business. And I reckon you can call it business. Work, anyway. I never saw a man want a thousand dollars badder and suffer more to get it, than him. And so she said that Brown’s house was bound to be the one that Lucas Burch had promised to get ready for her to live in, and so she moved out to wait until Brown come back from this here business he is away on. Byron said he couldn’t stop her because he didn’t want to tell her the truth about Brown after he had already lied to her in a way of speaking. He said he aimed to come and tell you about it before now, only you found it out too quick, before he had got her settled down good.”

“Lucas Burch?” the sheriff says.

“I was some surprised, myself,” the deputy says. “What do you aim to do about it?”’

“Nothing,” the sheriff says. “I reckon they won’t do no harm out there And it ain’t none of my house to tell her to get out of it. And like Byron told her, Burch or Brown or whatever his name is, is going to be right busy for a while longer yet.”

“Do you aim to tell Brown about her?”

“I reckon not,” the sheriff says. “It ain’t any of my business. I ain’t interested in the wives he left in Alabama, or anywhere else. What I am interested in is the husband he seems to have had since he come to Jefferson.”

The deputy guffaws. “I reckon that’s a fact,” he says. He sobers, muses. “If he don’t get that thousand dollars, I reckon he will just die.”

“I reckon he won’t,” the sheriff says.

At three o’clock Wednesday morning a negro rode into town on a saddleless mule. He went to the sheriff’s home and waked him. He had come direct from a negro church twenty miles away, where a revival meeting was in nightly progress. On the evening before, in the middle of a hymn, there had come a tremendous noise from the rear of the church, and turning the congregation saw a man standing in the door. The door had not been locked or even shut yet the man had apparently grasped it by the knob and hurled it back into the wall so that the sound crashed into the blended voices like a pistol shot. Then the man came swiftly up the aisle, where the singing had stopped short off, toward the pulpit where the preacher leaned, his hands still raised, his mouth still open. Then they saw that the man was white: In the thick, cavelike gloom which the two oil lamps but served to increase, they could not