Light in August - William Faulkner [125]
“What does he look like?” she said.
“I never noticed much,” the man said. “They had to bloody him up some, catching him. Young fellow. He don’t look no more like a nigger than I do, either.” The woman looked at them, down at them. Between the two men Hines stood on his own legs now, muttering a little now as if he were waking from sleep. “What do you want us to do with Uncle Doc?” the man said.
She did not answer that at all. It was as though she had not even recognised her husband, the man told his companion later. “What are they going to do with him?” she said.
“Him?” the man said. “Oh. The nigger. That’s for Jefferson to say. He belongs to them up there.”
She looked down at them, gray, still, remote. “Are they going to wait on Jefferson?”
“They?” the man said. “Oh,” he said. “Well, if Jefferson ain’t too long about it.” He shifted his grip on the old man’s arm. “Where do you want us to put him?” The woman moved then. She descended the steps and approached. “Well tote him into the house for you,” the man said.
“I can tote him,” she said. She and Hines were about the same height, though she was the heavier. She grasped him beneath the arms. “Eupheus,” she said, not loud; “Eupheus.” She said to the two men, quietly: “Let go. I got him.” They released him. He walked a little now. They watched her help him up the steps and into the door. She did not look back.
“She never even thanked us,” the second man said. “Maybe we ought to take him back and put him in jail with the nigger, since he seemed to know him so well.”
“Eupheus,” the first man said. “Eupheus. I been wondering for fifteen years what his name might be. Eupheus.”
“Come on. Let’s get on back. We might miss some of it.”
The first man looked at the house, at the closed door through which the two people had vanished. “She knowed him too.”
“Knowed who?”
“That nigger. Christmas.”
“Come on.” They returned to the car. “What do you think about that durn fellow, coming right into town here, within twenty miles of where he done it, walking up and down the main street until somebody recognised him. I wish it had been me that recognised him. I could have used that thousand dollars. But I never do have any luck.” The car moved on. The first man was still looking back at the blank door through which the two people had disappeared.
In the hall of that little house dark and small and ranklyodored as a cave, the old couple stood. The old man’s spent condition was still little better than coma, and when his wife led him to a chair and helped him into it, it seemed a matter of expediency and concern. But there was no need to return and lock the front door, which she did. She came and stood over him for a while. At first it seemed as if she were just watching him, with concern and solicitude. Then a third person would have seen that she was trembling violently and that she had lowered him into the chair either before she dropped him to the floor or in order to hold him prisoner until she could speak. She leaned above him: dumpy, obese, gray in color, with a face like that of a drowned corpse. When she spoke her voice shook and she strove with it, shaking, her hands clenched upon the arms of the chair in which he half lay, her voice shaking, restrained: “Eupheus. You listen to me. You got to listen to me. I ain’t worried you before. In thirty years I ain’t worried you. But now I am going to. I am going to know and you got to tell me. What did you do with Milly’s baby?”
Through the long afternoon they clotted about the square and before the jail—the clerks, the idle, the countrymen in overalls; the talk. It went here and thereabout the town, dying and borning again like a wind or a fire until in the lengthening shadows the country people began to depart in wagons and dusty cars and the townspeople began to move supperward. Then the talk flared again, momentarily revived, to wives and families about supper tables in electrically lighted rooms and in remote hill cabins with kerosene lamps. And on the next day, the slow, pleasant country Sunday while they squatted in their clean shirts and decorated suspenders, with peaceful pipes about country churches or about the shady dooryards of houses where the visiting teams and cars were tethered and parked along the fence and the womenfolks were in the kitchen, getting dinner, they told it again: