Light in August - William Faulkner [27]
“It was a strange thing. I thought that if there ever was a place where a man would be where the chance to do harm could not have found him, it would have been out there at the mill on a Saturday evening. And with the house burning too, right in my face, you might say. It was like all the time I was eating dinner and I would look up now and then and see that smoke and I would think, ‘Well, I won’t see a soul out here this evening, anyway. I ain’t going to be interrupted this evening, at least.’ And then I looked up and there she was, with her face all fixed for smiling and with her mouth all fixed to say his name, when she saw that I wasn’t him. And I never knowed any better than to blab the whole thing.” He grimaces faintly. It is not a smile. His upper lip just lifts momentarily, the movement, even the surface wrinkling, travelling no further and vanishing almost at once. “I never even suspicioned then that what I didn’t know was not the worst of it.”
“It must have been a strange thing that could keep Byron Bunch in Jefferson over Sunday,” Hightower says. “But she was looking for him. And you helped her to find him. Wasn’t what you did what she wanted, what she had come all the way from Alabama to find?”
“I reckon I told her, all right. I reckon it ain’t any question about that. With her watching me, sitting there, swolebellied, watching me with them eyes that a man could not have lied to if he had wanted. And me blabbing on, with that smoke right yonder in plain sight like it was put there to warn me, to make me watch my mouth only I never had the sense to see it.”
“Oh,” Hightower says. “The house that burned yesterday. But I don’t see any connection between—Whose house was it? I saw the smoke, myself, and I asked a passing negro, but he didn’t know.”
“That old Burden house,” Byron says. He looks at the other. They look at one another. Hightower is a tall man, and he was thin once. But he is not thin now. His skin is the color of flour sacking and his upper body in shape is like a loosely filled sack falling from his gaunt shoulders of its own weight, upon his lap. Then Byron says, “You ain’t heard yet.” The other watches him. He says in a musing tone: “That would be for me to do too. To tell on two days to two folks something they ain’t going to want to hear and that they hadn’t ought to have to hear at all.”
“What is this that you think I will not want to hear? What is it that I have not heard?”
“Not the fire,” Byron says. “They got out of the fire all right.”
“They? I understood that Miss Burden lived there alone.”
Again Byron looks at the other for a moment. But Hightower’s face is merely grave and interested. “Brown and Christmas,” Byron says. Still Hightower’s face does not change in expression. “You ain’t heard that, even,” Byron says. “They lived out there.”
“Lived out there? They boarded in the house?”
“No. In a old nigger cabin in the back. Christmas fixed it up three years ago. He’s been living in it ever since, with folks wondering where he slept at night. Then when him and Brown set up together, he took Brown in with him.”
“Oh,” Hightower said. “But I don’t see ... If they were comfortable, and Miss Burden didn’t—”
“I reckon they got along. They were selling whiskey, using that old place for a headquarters, a blind. I don’t reckon she knew that, about the whiskey. Leastways, folks don’t know if she ever knew or not. They say that Christmas started it by himself three years ago, just selling to a few regular customers that didn’t even know one another. But when he took Brown in with him, I reckon Brown wanted to spread out. Selling it by the half a pint out of his shirt bosom in any alley and to anybody. Selling what he never drunk, that is. And I reckon the way they got the whiskey they sold would not have stood much looking into. Because about two weeks after Brown quit out at the mill and taken to riding around in that new car for his steady work, he was down town drunk one Saturday night and bragging to a crowd in the barbershop something about him and Christmas in Memphis one night, or on a road close to Memphis. Something about them and that new car hid in the bushes and Christmas with a pistol, and a lot more about a truck and a hundred gallons of something, until Christmas come in quick and walked up to him and jerked him out of the chair. And Christmas saying in that quiet voice of his, that ain