Light in August - William Faulkner [95]
So when he now came to her, after the passive and cold and seemly transports of sheer habit she began to speak of a child. She talked about it impersonally at first, discussing children. Perhaps it was sheer and instinctive feminine cunning and indirection, perhaps not. Anyway, it was some time before he discovered with a kind of shock that she was discussing it as a possibility, a practical thought. He said No at once.
“Why not?” she said. She looked at him, speculative. He was thinking fast, thinking She wants to be married. That’s it. She wants a child no more than I do. ‘It’s just a trick,’ he thought. ‘I should have known it, expected it. I should have cleared out of here a year ago.’ But he was afraid to tell her this, to let the word marriage come between them, come aloud, thinking, ‘She may not have thought of it, and I will just put the notion in her head.’ She was watching him. “Why not?” she said. And then something in him flashed Why not? It would mean ease, security, for the rest of your life. You would never have to move again. And you might as well be married to her as this thinking, ‘No. If I give in now, I will deny all the thirty years that I have lived to make me what I chose to be.’ He said:
“If we were going to have one, I guess we would have had one two years ago.”
“We didn’t want one then.”
“We don’t want one now, either,” he said.
That was in September. Just after Christmas she told him that she was pregnant. Almost before she ceased to speak, he believed that she was lying. He discovered now that he had been expecting her to tell him that for three months. But when he looked at her face, he knew that she was not. He believed that she also knew that she was not. He thought, ‘Here it comes. She will say it now: marry. But I can at least get out of the house first.’
But she did not. She was sitting quite still on the bed, her hands on her lap, her still New England face (it was still the face of a spinster: prominently boned, long, a little thin, almost manlike: in contrast to it her plump body was more richly and softly animal than ever) lowered. She said, in a tone musing, detached, impersonal: “A full measure. Even to a bastard negro child. I would like to see father’s and Calvin’s faces. This will be a good time for you to run, if that’s what you want to do.” But it was as though she were not listening to her own voice, did not intend for the words to have any actual meaning: that final upflare of stubborn and dying summer upon which autumn, the dawning of halfdeath, had come unawares. ‘It’s over now,’ she thought quietly; ‘finished.’ Except the waiting, for one month more to pass, to be sure; she had learned that from the negro women, that you could not always tell until after two months. She would have to wait another month, watching the calendar. She made a mark on the calendar to be sure, so there would be no mistake; through the bedroom window she watched that month accomplish. A frost had come, and some of the leaves were beginning to turn. The marked day on the calendar came and passed; she gave herself another week, to be doubly sure. She was not elated, since she was not surprised. “I am with child,” she said, quietly, aloud.
‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ he told himself, that same day. ‘I’ll go Sunday,’ he thought. ‘I’ll wait and get this week’s pay, and then I am gone: He began to look forward to Saturday, planning where he would go. He did not see her all that week. He expected her to send for him. When he entered or left the cabin he would find himself avoiding looking toward the house, as he had during the first week he was there. He did not see her at all: Now and then he would see the negro women, in nondescript garments against the autumn chill, coming or going along the worn paths, entering or leaving the house. But that was all. When Saturday came, he did not go.