Light in August - William Faulkner [108]
“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 à 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