Light in August - William Faulkner [141]
“Or maybe you mean a drummer, a agent, a salesman,” Byron says. “It’s a poor thing. I know that. You don’t need to tell me.”
“But I am not clairvoyant, like you. You seem to know already what I could tell you, yet you will not tell me what you intend for me to know. What is it you want me to do? Shall I go plead guilty to the murder? Is that it?”
Byron’s face cracks with that grimace faint, fleeting, sardonic, weary, without mirth. “It’s next to that, I reckon.” Then his face sobers; it is quite grave. “It’s a poor thing to ask. God knows I know that.” He watches his slow hand where it moves, preoccupied and trivial, upon the desk top. “I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that can’t deny the bill when it comes around. They can’t deny it for the reason that there ain’t anyway to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that’s why don’t anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good can’t. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad. And it won’t be like you haven’t done it before, haven’t already paid a bill like it once before. It oughtn’t to be so bad now as it was then.”
“Go on. Go on. What is it I am to do?”
Byron watches his slow and ceaseless hand, musing. “He ain’t never admitted that he killed her. And all the evidence they got against him is Brown’s word, which is next to none. You could say he was here with you that night. Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it. Folks would believe you. They would believe that, anyway. They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her. And you are old now. They wouldn’t do anything to you about it that would hurt you now. And I reckon you are used to everything else they can do.”
“Oh,” Hightower says. “Ah. Yes. Yes. They would believe it. That would be very simple, very good. Good for all. Then he will be restored to them who have suffered because of him, and Brown without the reward could be scared into making her child legitimate and then into fleeing again and forever this time. And then it would be just her and Byron. Since I am just an old man who has been fortunate enough to grow old without having to learn the despair of love.” He is shaking, steadily; he looks up now. In the lamplight his face looks slick, as if it had been oiled. Wrung and twisted, it gleams in the lamplight; the yellowed, oftwashed shirt which was fresh this morning is damp with sweat. “It’s not because I can’t, don’t dare to,” he says; “it’s because I won’t! I won’t! do you hear?” He raises his hands from the chairarms. “It’s because I won’t do it!” Byron does not move. His hand on the desk top has ceased; he watches the other, thinking It ain’t me he is shouting at. It’s like he knows there is something nearer him than me to convince of that Because now Hightower is shouting, “I won’t do it! I won’t!” with his hands raised and clenched, his face sweating, his lip lifted upon his clenched and rotting teeth from about which the long sagging of flabby and puttycolored flesh falls away. Suddenly his voice rises higher yet. “Get out!” he screams. “Get out of my house! Get out of my house!” Then he falls forward, onto the desk, his face between his extended arms and his clenched fists. As, the two old people moving ahead of him, Byron looks back from the door, he sees that Hightower has not moved, his bald head and his extended and clenchfisted arms lying full in the pool of light from the shaded lamp. Beyond the open window the sound of insects has not ceased, not faltered.
Chapter 17
THAT was Sunday night. Lena’s child was born the next morning. It was just dawn when Byron stopped his galloping mule before the house which he had quitted not six hours ago. He sprang to the ground already running, and ran up the narrow walk toward the dark porch. He seemed to stand aloof and watch himself, for all his haste, thinking with a kind of grim unsurprise: