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Byron Bunch knows this: It was one Friday morning three years ago. And the group of men at work in the planer shed looked up, and saw the stranger standing there, watching them. They did not know how long he had been there. He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either. His shoes were dusty and his trousers were soiled too. But they were of decent serge, sharply creased, and his shirt was soiled but it was a white shirt, and he wore a tie and a stiffbrim straw hat that was quite new, cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face. He did not look like a professional hobo in his professional rags, but there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home. And that he carried his knowledge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruthless, lonely, and almost proud. “As if,” as the men said later, “he was just down on his luck for a time, and that he didn’t intend to stay down on it and didn’t give a damn much how he rose up.” He was young. And Byron watched him standing there and looking at the men in sweatstained overalls, with a cigarette in one side of his mouth and his face darkly and contemptuously still, drawn down a little on one side because of the smoke. After a while he spat the cigarette without touching his hand to it and turned and went on to the mill office while the men in faded and worksoiled overalls looked at his back with a sort of baffled outrage. “We ought to run him through the planer,” the foreman said. “Maybe that will take that look off his face.”
They did not know who he was. None of them had ever seen him before. “Except that’s a pretty risky look for a man to wear on his face in public,” one said: “He might forget and use it somewhere where somebody wont like it.” Then they dismissed him, from the talk, anyway. They went back to their work among the whirring and grating belts and shafts. But it was not ten minutes before the mill superintendent entered, with the stranger behind him.
“Put this man on,” the superintendent said to the foreman. “He says he can handle a scoop, anyhow. You can put him on the sawdust pile.”
The others had not stopped work, yet there was not a man in the shed who was not again watching the stranger in his soiled city clothes, with his dark, insufferable face and his whole air of cold and quiet contempt. The foreman looked at him, briefly, his gaze as cold as the other’s. “Is he going to do it in them clothes?”
“That’s his business,” the superintendent said. “I’m not hiring his clothes.”
“Well, whatever he wears suits me if it suits you and him,” the foreman said. “All right, mister,” he said. “Go down yonder and get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust.”
The newcomer turned without a word. The others watched him go down to the sawdust pile and vanish and reappear with a shovel and go to work. The foreman and the superintendent were talking at the door. They parted and the foreman returned. “His name is Christmas,” he said.
“His name is what?” one said.
“Christmas.”
“Is he a foreigner?”
“Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?” the foreman said.
“I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,” the other said.
And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time. It seemed to him that none of them had looked especially at the stranger until they heard his name. But as soon as they heard it, it was as though there was something in the sound of it that was trying to tell them what to expect; that he carried with him his own inescapable warning, like a flower its scent or a rattlesnake its rattle. Only none of them had sense enough to recognise it. They just thought that he was a foreigner, and as they watched him for the rest of that Friday, working in that tie and the straw hat and the creased trousers, they said among themselves that that was the way men in his country worked; though there were others who said, “He’ll change clothes tonight. He wont have on them Sunday clothes when he comes to work in the morning.”
Saturday morning came. As the late arrivals came up just before the whistle blew, they were already saying, “Did he—Where—” The others pointed. The new man was standing alone down at the sawdust pile. His shovel was beside him, and he stood in the same garments of yesterday, with the arrogant hat, smoking a cigarette. “He was there when we come,” the first ones said. “Just standing there, like that. Like he hadn’t never been to bed, even.”
He did not talk to any of them at all. And none of them tried to talk to him. But they were all conscious of him, of the steady back (he worked well enough, with a kind of baleful and restrained steadiness) and arms. Noon came. With the exception of Byron, they had brought no lunch with them today, and they began to gather up their belongings preparatory to quitting until Monday. Byron went alone with his lunch pail to the pump house where they usually ate, and sat down. Then something caused him to look up. A short distance away the stranger was leaning against a post, smoking. Byron knew that he had been there when he entered, and would not even bother to go away. Or worse: that he had come there deliberately, ignoring Byron as if he were another post. “Aint you going to knock off?” Byron said.
The other expelled smoke. Then he looked at Byron. His face was gaunt, the flesh a level dead parchment color. Not the skin: the flesh itself, as though the skull had been molded in a still and deadly regularity and then baked in a fierce oven. “How much do they pay for overtime?” he said. And then Byron knew. He knew then why the other worked in the Sunday clothes, and why he had had no lunch with him either yesterday or today, and why he had not quit with the others at noon. He knew as well as if the man had told him that he did not have a nickel in his pockets and that in all likelihood he had lived on cigarettes for two or three days now. Almost with the thought Byron was offering his own pail, the action as reflex as the thought. Because before the act was completed the man, without changing his indolent and contemptuous attitude, turned his face and looked once at the proffered pail through the drooping smoke of the cigarette. “I ain’t hungry. Keep your muck.”
Monday morning came and Byron proved himself right. The man came to work in new overalls, and with a paper bag of food. But he did not squat with them in the pump house to eat at noon, and the look was still on his face. “Let it stay there,” the foreman said. “Simms ain’t hiring his face anymore than his clothes.”
Simms hadn’t hired the stranger’s tongue, either, Byron thought. At least, Christmas didn’t seem to think so, to act so. He still had nothing to say to anyone, even after six months. No one knew what he did between mill hours. Now and then one of his fellow workers would pass him on the square downtown after supper, and it would be as though Christmas had never seen the other before. He would be wearing then the new hat and the ironed trousers and the cigarette in one side of his mouth and the smoke sneering across his face. No one knew where he lived, slept at night, save that now and then someone would see him following a path that came up through the woods on the edge of town, as if he might live out that way somewhere.
This is not what Byron knows now. This is just what he knew then, what he heard and watched as it came to his knowledge. None of them knew then where Christmas lived and what he was actually doing behind the veil, the screen, of his negro’s job at the mill. Possibly no one would ever have known if it had not been for the other stranger, Brown. But as soon as Brown told, there were a dozen men who admitted having bought whiskey from Christmas for over two years, meeting him at night and alone in the woods behind an old colonial plantation house two miles from town, in which a middleaged spinster named Burden lived alone. But even the ones who bought the whiskey did not know that Christmas was actually living in a tumble down negro cabin on Miss Burden’s place, and that he had been living in it for more than two years.
Then one day about six months ago another stranger appeared at the mill as Christmas had done, seeking work. He was young too, tall, already in overalls which looked as though he had been in them constantly for some time, and he looked as though he had been travelling light also. He had an alert, weakly handsome face with a small white scar beside the mouth that looked as if it had been contemplated a great deal in the mirror, and a way of jerking his head quickly and glancing over his shoulder like a mule does in front of an automobile in the road, Byron thought. But it was not alone backwatching, alarm; it seemed also to Byron to possess a quality of assurance, brass, as though the man were reiterating and insisting all the while that he was afraid of nothing that might or could approach him from behind. And when Mooney, the foreman, saw the new hand, Byron believed that he and Mooney had the same thought. Mooney said: “Well, Simms is safe from hiring anything at all when he put that fellow on. He never even hired a whole pair of pants.”
“That’s so,” Byron said. “He puts me in mind of one of these cars running along the street with a radio in it. You can’t make out what it is saying and the car ain’t going anywhere in particular and when you look at it close you see that there ain’t even anybody in it.”
“Yes,” Mooney said. “He puts me in mind of a horse. Not a mean horse. Just a worthless horse. Looks fine in the pasture, but it’s always down in the spring bottom when anybody comes to the gate with a bridle. Runs fast, all right, but it’s always got a sore hoof when hitching-up time comes.”
“But I reckon maybe the mares like him,” Byron said.
“Sho,” Mooney said. “I don’t reckon he’d do even a mare any permanent harm.”
The new hand went to work down in the sawdust pile with Christmas. With a lot of motion to it, telling everybody who he was and where he had been, in a tone and manner that was the essence of the man himself, that carried within itself its own confounding and mendacity. So that a man put no more belief in what he said that he had done than in what he said his name was, Byron thought. There was no reason why his name should not have been Brown. It was that, looking at him, a man would know that at some time in his life he would reach some crisis in his own foolishness when he would change his name, and that he would think of Brown to change it to with a kind of gleeful exultation, as though the name had never been invented. The thing was, there was no reason why he should have had or have needed any name at all. Nobody cared, just as Byron believed that no one (wearing pants, anyway) cared where he came from nor where he went nor how long he stayed. Because wherever he came from and wherever he had been, a man knew that he was just living on the country, like a locust. It was as though he had been doing it for so long now that all of him had become scattered and diffused and now there was nothing left but the transparent and weightless shell blown oblivious and without destination upon whatever wind.
He worked some, though, after a fashion. Byron believed that there was not even enough left of him to do a good, shrewd job of shirking. To desire to shirk, even, since a man must be better than common to do a good job of malingering, the same as a good job at anything else: of stealing and murdering even. He must be aiming at some specific and definite goal, working toward it. And he believed that Brown was not. They heard how he went and lost his entire first week’s pay in a crap game on the first Saturday night. Byron said to Mooney: “I am surprised at that. I would have thought that maybe shooting dice would be the one thing he could do.”
“Him?” Mooney said. “What makes you think that he could be good at any kind of devilment when he ain’t any good at anything as easy as shovelling sawdust? that he could fool anybody with anything as hard to handle as a pair of dice, when he can’t with anything as easy to handle as a scoop?” Then he said, “Well, I reckon there ain’t any man so sorry he can’t beat somebody doing something. Because he can at least beat that Christmas doing nothing at all.”
“Sho,” Byron said, “I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.”
“I reckon he’d be bad fast enough,” Mooney said, “if he just had somebody to show him how.”
“Well, he’ll find that fellow somewhere, sooner or later,” Byron said. They both turned and looked down at the sawdust pile, where Brown and Christmas labored, the one with that brooding and savage steadiness, the other with a higharmed and erratic motion which could not have been fooling even itself.
“I reckon so,” Mooney said. “But if I aimed to be bad, I’d sho hate to have him for my partner.”
Like Christmas, Brown came to work in the same clothes which he wore on the street. But unlike Christmas, he made no change in his costume for some time. “He’ll win just enough in that crap game some Saturday night to buy a new suit and still have fifty cents in nickels to rattle in his pocket,” Mooney said. “And on the next Monday morning we aint going to see him again.” Meanwhile Brown continued to come to work in the same overalls and shirt in which he had arrived in Jefferson, losing his week’s pay in the Saturday night dice game or perhaps winning a little, greeting either the one or the other with the same shouts of imbecile laughter, joking and chaffing with the very men who in all likelihood were periodically robbing him. Then one day they heard that he had won sixty dollars. “Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him,” one said.
“I dont know,” Mooney said. “Sixty dollars is the wrong figure. If it had been either ten dollars or five hundred, I reckon you’d be right. But not just sixty. He’ll just feel now that he is settled down good here, drawing at last somewhere about what he is worth a week.” And on Monday he did return to work, in the overalls; they saw them, Brown and Christmas, down at the sawdust pile. They had been watching the two of them down there from the day when Brown went to work: Christmas jabbing his shovel into the sawdust slowly and steadily and hard, as though he were chopping up a buried snake (“or a man,” Mooney said) and Brown leaning on his shovel while he apparently told Christmas a story, an anecdote. Because presently he would laugh, shout with laughter, his head backflung, while beside him the other man worked with silent and unflagging savageness. Then Brown would fall to again, working for a time once again as fast as Christmas, but picking up less and less in the scoop until at last the shovel would not even touch the sawdust in its flagging arc. Then he would lean upon it again and apparently finish whatever it was that he was telling Christmas, telling to the man who did not even seem to hear his voice. As if the other were a mile away, or spoke a different language from the one he knew, Byron thought. And they would be seen together down town on Saturday evening sometimes: Christmas in his neat, soberly austere serge-and-white and the straw hat, and Brown in his new suit (it was tan, with a red crisscross, and he had a colored shirt and a hat like Christmas’ but with a colored band) talking and laughing, his voice heard clear across the square and back again in echo, somewhat as a meaningless sound in a church seems to come from everywhere at once. Like he aimed for everybody to see how he and Christmas were buddies, Byron thought. And then Christmas would turn and with that still, sullen face of his walk out of whatever small gathering the sheer empty sound of Brown’s voice had surrounded them with, with Brown following, still laughing and talking. And each time the other workmen would say, “Well, he wont be back on the job Monday morning.” But each Monday he was back. It was Christmas who quit first.
He quit one Saturday night, without warning, after almost three years. It was Brown who informed them that Christmas had quit. Some of the other workers were family men and some were bachelors and they were of different ages and they led a catholic variety of lives, yet on Monday morning they all came to work with a kind of gravity, almost decorum. Some of them were young, and they drank and gambled on Saturday night, and even went to Memphis now and then. Yet on Monday morning they came quietly and soberly to work, in clean overalls and clean shirts, waiting quietly until the whistle blew and then going quietly to work, as though there were still something of Sabbath in the overlingering air which established a tenet that, no matter what a man had done with his Sabbath, to come quiet and clean to work on Monday morning was no more than seemly and right to do.
That is what they had always remarked about Brown. On Monday morning as likely as not he would appear in the same soiled clothes of last week, and with a black stubble that had known no razor. And he would be more noisy than ever, shouting and playing the pranks of a child of ten. To the sober others it did not look right. To them it was as though he had arrived naked, or drunk. Hence it was Brown who on this Monday morning notified them that Christmas had quit. He arrived late, but that was not it. He hadn’t shaved, either; but that was not it. He was quiet. For a time they did not know that he was even present, who by that time should have had half the men there cursing him, and some in good earnest. He appeared just as the whistle blew and went straight to the sawdust pile and went to work without a word to anyone, even when one man spoke to him. And then they saw that he was down there alone, that Christmas, his partner, was not there. When the foreman came in, one said: “Well, I see you have lost one of your apprentice firemen.”
Mooney looked down to where Brown was spading into the sawdust pile as though it were eggs. He spat briefly. “Yes. He got rich too fast. This little old job couldn’t hold him.”
“Got rich?” another said.
“One of them did,” Mooney said, still watching Brown. “I saw them yesterday riding in a new car. He”—he jerked his head toward Brown—“was driving it. I wasn’t surprised at that. I am just surprised that even one of them come to work today.”
“Well, I don’t reckon Simms will have any trouble finding a man to fill his shoes in these times,” the other said.
“He wouldn’t have any trouble doing that at any time,” Mooney said.
“It looked to me like he was doing pretty well.”
“Oh,” Mooney said. “I see. You are talking about Christmas.”
“Who were you talking about? Has Brown said he is quitting too?”
“You reckon he’s going to stay down there, working, with the other one riding around town all day in that new car?”
“Oh.” The other looked at Brown too. “I wonder where they got that car.”
“I don’t,” Mooney said. “What I wonder is, if Brown is going to quit at noon or work on until six o’clock.”
“Well,” Byron said, “if I could get rich enough out here to buy a new automobile, I’d quit too.”
One or two of the others looked at Byron. They smiled a little. “They never got that rich out here,” one said. Byron looked at him. “I reckon Byron stays out of meanness too much himself to keep up with other folks’,” the other said. They looked at Byron. “Brown is what you might call a public servant. Christmas used to make them come way out to them woods back of Miss Burden’s place, at night; now Brown brings it right into town for them. I hear tell how if you just know the pass word, you can buy a pint of whiskey out of his shirt front in any alley on a Saturday night.”
“What’s the pass word?” another said. “Six bits?”
Byron looked from face to face. “Is that a fact? Is that what they are doing?”
“That’s what Brown is doing. I don’t know about Christmas. I wouldn’t swear to it. But Brown aint going to be far away from where Christmas is at. Like to like, as the old folks say.”
“That’s a fact,” another said. “Whether Christmas is in it or not, I reckon we aint going to know. He aint going to walk around in public with his pants down, like Brown does.”
“He aint going to need to,” Mooney said, looking at Brown.
And Mooney was right. They watched Brown until noon, down there at the sawdust pile by himself. Then the whistle blew and they got their lunch pails and squatted in the pump shed and began to eat. Brown came in, glum, his face at once sullen and injured looking, like a child’s, and squatted among them, his hands dangling between his knees. He had no lunch with him today.
“Aint you going to eat any dinner?” one said.
“Cold muck out of a dirty lard bucket?” Brown said. “Starting in at daylight and slaving all day like a durn nigger, with a hour off at noon to eat cold muck out of a tin bucket.”
“Well, maybe some folks work like the niggers work where they come from,” Mooney said. “But a nigger wouldn’t last till the noon whistle, working on this job like some white folks work on it.”
But Brown did not seem to hear, to be listening, squatting with his sullen face and his dangling hands. It was as though he were not listening to any save himself, listening to himself: “A fool. A man is a fool that will do it.”
“You are not chained to that scoop,” Mooney said.
“You durn right I aint,” Brown said.
Then the whistle blew. They went back to work. They watched Brown down at the sawdust pile. He would dig for a while, then he would begin to slow, moving slower and slower until at last he would be clutching the shovel as though it were a riding whip, and they could see that he was talking to himself. “Because there aint nobody else down there for him to tell it to,” one said.
“It’s not that,” Mooney said. “He hasn’t quite convinced himself yet. He aint quite sold yet.”
“Sold on what?”
“On the idea that he’s a bigger fool than even I think he is,” Mooney said.
The next morning he did not appear. “His address from now on will be the barbershop,” one said.
“Or that alley just behind it,” another said.
“I reckon we’ll see him once more,” Mooney said. “He’ll be out here once more to draw his time for yesterday.”
Which he did. About eleven o’clock he came up. He wore now the new suit and the straw hat, and he stopped at the shed and stood there looking at the working men as Christmas had done on that day three years ago, as if somehow the very attitudes of the master’s dead life motivated, unawares to him, the willing muscles of the disciple who had learned too quick and too well. But Brown merely contrived to look scattered and emptily swaggering where the master had looked sullen and quiet and fatal as a snake. “Lay into it, you slaving bastards!” Brown said, in a merry, loud voice cropped with teeth.
Mooney looked at Brown. Then Brown’s teeth didn’t show. “You aint calling me that,” Mooney said, “are you?”
Brown’s mobile face performed one of those instantaneous changes which they knew. Like it was so scattered and so lightly built that it wasn’t any trouble for even him to change it, Byron thought. “I wasn’t talking to you,” Brown said.
“Oh, I see.” Mooney’s tone was quite pleasant, easy. “It was these other fellows you were calling a bastard.”
Immediately a second one said: “Were you calling that at me?”
“I was just talking to myself,” Brown said.
“Well, you have told God’s truth for once in your life,” Mooney said. “The half of it, that is. Do you want me to come up there and whisper the other half in your ear?”
And that was the last they saw of him at the mill, though Byron knows and remembers now the new car (with presently a crumpled fender or two) about the town, idle, destinationless, and constant, with Brown lolling behind the wheel and not making a very good job of being dissolute and enviable and idle. Now and then Christmas would be with him, but not often. And it is now no secret what they were doing. It is a byword among young men and even boys that whiskey can be bought from Brown almost on sight, and the town is just waiting for him to get caught, to produce from his raincoat and offer to sell it to an undercover man. They still do not know for certain if Christmas is connected with it, save that no one believes that Brown alone has sense enough to make a profit even from bootlegging, and some of them know that Christmas and Brown both live in a cabin on the Burden place. But even these do not know if Miss Burden knows it or not, and if they did, they would not tell her. She lives in the big house alone, a woman of middleage. She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover of negroes, about whom in the town there is still talk of queer relations with negroes in the town and out of it, despite the fact that it is now sixty years since her grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an exslaveowner over a question of negro votes in a state election. But it still lingers about her and about the place: something dark and outlandish and threatful, even though she is but a woman and but the descendant of them whom the ancestors of the town had reason (or thought that they had) to hate and dread. But it is there: the descendants of both in their relationship to one another ghosts, with between them the phantom of the old spilled blood and the old horror and anger and fear.
If there had been love once, man or woman would have said that Byron Bunch had forgotten her. Or she (meaning love) him, more like—that small man who will not see thirty again, who has spent six days of every week for seven years at the planing mill, feeding boards into the machinery. Saturday afternoons too he spends there, alone now, with the other workmen all downtown in their Sunday clothes and neckties, in that terrific and aimless and restive idleness of men who labor.
On these Saturday afternoons he loads the finished boards into freight cars, since he cannot operate the planer alone, keeping his own time to the final second of an imaginary whistle. The other workmen, the town itself or that part of it which remembers or thinks about him, believe that he does it for the overtime which he receives. Perhaps this is the reason. Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing. In fact, there is but one man in the town who could speak with any certainty about Bunch, and with this man the town does not know that Bunch has any intercourse, since they meet and talk only at night. This man’s name is Hightower. Twenty-five years ago he was minister of one of the principal churches, perhaps the principal church. This man alone knows where Bunch goes each Saturday evening when the imaginary whistle blows (or when Bunch’s huge silver watch says that it has blown). Mrs Beard, at whose boarding house Bunch lives, knows only that shortly after six o’clock each Saturday Bunch enters, bathes and changes to a suit of cheap serge which is not new, eats his supper and saddles the mule which he stables in a shed behind the house which Bunch himself patched up and roofed, and departs on the mule. She does not know where he goes. It is the minister Hightower alone who knows that Bunch rides thirty miles into the country and spends Sunday leading the choir in a country church—a service which lasts all day long. Then some time around midnight he saddles the mule again and rides back to Jefferson at a steady, allnight jog. And on Monday morning, in his clean overalls and shirt he will be on hand at the mill when the whistle blows. Mrs Beard knows only that from Saturday’s supper to Monday’s breakfast each week his room and the mule’s homemade stable will be vacant. Hightower alone knows where he goes and what he does there, because two or three nights a week Bunch visits Hightower in the small house where the ex-minister lives alone, in what the town calls his disgrace—the house unpainted, small, obscure, poorly lighted, mansmelling, manstale. Here the two of them sit in the minister’s study, talking quietly: the slight, nondescript man who is utterly unaware that he is a man of mystery among his fellow workers, and the fifty-year-old outcast who has been denied by his church.
Then Byron fell in love. He fell in love contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising which demands in the object physical inviolability. It happens on a Saturday afternoon while he is alone at the mill. Two miles away the house is still burning, the yellow smoke standing straight as a monument on the horizon. They saw it before noon, when the smoke first rose above the trees, before the whistle blew and the others departed. “I reckon Byron’ll quit too, today,” they said. “With a free fire to watch.”
“It’s a big fire,” another said. “What can it be? I dont remember anything out that way big enough to make all that smoke except that Burden house.”
“Maybe that’s what it is,” another said. “My pappy says he can remember how fifty years ago folks said it ought to be burned, and with a little human fat meat to start it good.”
“Maybe your pappy slipped out there and set it afire,” a third said. They laughed. Then they went back to work, waiting for the whistle, pausing now and then to look at the smoke. After a while a truck loaded with logs drove in. They asked the truck driver, who had come through town.
“Burden,” the driver said. “Yes. That’s the name. Somebody in town said that the sheriff had gone out there too.”
“Well, I reckon Watt Kennedy likes to watch a fire, even if he does have to take that badge with him,” one said.
“From the way the square looks,” the driver said, “he wont have much trouble finding anybody he wants out there to arrest.”
The noon whistle blew. The others departed. Byron ate his lunch, the silver watch open beside him. When it said one o’clock, he went back to work. He was alone in the loading shed, making his steady and interminable journeys between the shed and the car, with a piece of folded tow sack upon his shoulder for a pad and bearing upon the pad stacked burdens of staves which another would have said he could not raise nor carry, when Lena Grove walked into the door behind him, her face already shaped with serene anticipatory smiling, her mouth already shaped upon a name. He hears her and turns and sees her face fade like the dying agitation of a dropped pebble in a spring.
“You aint him,” she says behind her fading smile, with the grave astonishment of a child.
“No, ma’am,” Byron says. He pauses, half turning with the balanced staves. “I dont reckon I am. Who is it I aint?”
“Lucas Burch. They told me—”
“Lucas Burch?”
“They told me I would find him out here.” She speaks with a kind of serene suspicion, watching him without blinking, as if she believes that he is trying to trick her. “When I got close to town they kept a-calling it Bunch instead of Burch. But I just thought they was saying it wrong. Or maybe I just heard it wrong.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “That’s what it is: Bunch. Byron Bunch.” With the staves still balanced on his shoulder he looks at her, at her swollen body, her heavy loins, at the red dust upon the man’s heavy shoes upon her feet. “Are you Miz Burch?”
She does not answer at once. She stands there just inside the door, watching him intently but without alarm, with that untroubled, faintly baffled, faintly suspicious gaze. Her eyes are quite blue. But in them is that shadow of the belief that he is trying to deceive her. “They told me away back on the road that Lucas is working at the planing mill in Jefferson. Lots of them told me. And I got to Jefferson and they told me where the planing mill was, and I asked in town about Lucas Burch and they said, ‘Maybe you mean Bunch’; and so I thought they had just got the name wrong and so it wouldn’t make any difference. Even when they told me the man they meant wasn’t dark complected. You aint telling me you dont know Lucas Burch out here.”
Byron puts down the load of staves, in a neat stack, ready to be taken up again. “No, ma’am. Not out here. Not no Lucas Burch out here. And I know all the folks that work here. He may work somewhere in town. Or at another mill.”
“Is there another planing mill?”
“No, ma’am. There’s some sawmills, a right smart of them, though.”
She watches him. “They told me back down the road that he worked for the planing mill.”
“I dont know of any here by that name,” Byron says. “I dont recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch.”
She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now. Then she breathes. It is not a sigh: she just breathes deeply and quietly once. “Well,” she says. She half turns and glances about, at the sawn boards, the stacked staves. “I reckon I’ll set down a while. It’s right tiring, walking over them hard streets from town. It seems like walking out here from town tired me more than all that way from Alabama did.” She is moving toward a low stack of planks.
“Wait,” Byron says. He almost springs forward, slipping the sack pad from his shoulder. The woman arrests herself in the act of sitting and Byron spreads the sack on the planks. “You’ll set easier.”
“Why, you’re right kind.” She sits down.
“I reckon it’ll set a little easier,” Byron says. He takes from his pocket the silver watch and looks at it; then he too sits, at the other end of the stack of lumber. “I reckon five minutes will be about right.”
“Five minutes to rest?” she says.
“Five minutes from when you come in. It looks like I done already started resting. I keep my own time on Saturday evenings,” he says.
“And every time you stop for a minute, you keep a count of it? How will they know you stopped? A few minutes wouldn’t make no difference, would it?”
“I reckon I aint paid for setting down,” he says. “So you come from Alabama.”
She tells him, in his turn, sitting on the towsack pad, heavy-bodied, her face quiet and tranquil, and he watching her as quietly; telling him more than she knows that she is telling, as she has been doing now to the strange faces among whom she has travelled for four weeks with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season. And Byron in his turn gets the picture of a young woman betrayed and deserted and not even aware that she has been deserted, and whose name is not yet Burch.
“No, I dont reckon I know him,” he says at last. “There aint anybody but me out here this evening, anyway. The rest of them are all out yonder at that fire, more than like.” He shows her the yellow pillar of smoke standing tall and windless above the trees.
“We could see it from the wagon before we got to town,” she says. “It’s a right big fire.”
“It’s a right big old house. It’s been there a long time. Dont nobody live in it but one lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town will call it a judgment on her, even now. She is a Yankee. Her folks come down here in the Reconstruction, to stir up the niggers. Two of them got killed doing it. They say she is still mixed up with niggers. Visits them when they are sick, like they was white. Wont have a cook because it would have to be a nigger cook. Folks say she claims that niggers are the same as white folks. That’s why folks dont never go out there. Except one.” She is watching him, listening. Now he does not look at her, looking a little aside. “Or maybe two, from what I hear. I hope they was out there in time to help her move her furniture out. Maybe they was.”
“Maybe who was?”
“Two fellows named Joe that live out that way somewhere. Joe Christmas and Joe Brown.”
“Joe Christmas? That’s a funny name.”
“He’s a funny fellow.” Again he looks a little aside from her interested face. “His partner’s a sight, too, Brown. He used to work here too. But they done quit now, both of them. Which aint nobody’s loss, I reckon.”
The woman sits on the towsack pad, interested, tranquil. The two of them might be sitting in their Sunday clothes, in splint chairs on the patinasmooth earth before a country cabin on a sabbath afternoon. “Is his partner named Joe too?”
“Yes, ma’am. Joe Brown. But I reckon that may be his right name. Because when you think of a fellow named Joe Brown, you think of a bigmouthed fellow that’s always laughing and talking loud. And so I reckon that is his right name, even if Joe Brown does seem a little kind of too quick and too easy for a natural name, somehow. But I reckon it is his, all right. Because if he drew time on his mouth, he would be owning this here mill right this minute. Folks seem to like him, though. Him and Christmas get along, anyway.”
She is watching him. Her face is still serene, but now it is quite grave, her eyes quite grave and quite intent. “What do him and the other one do?”
“Nothing they hadn’t ought to, I reckon. At least, they aint been caught at it yet. Brown used to work here, some; what time he had off from laughing and playing jokes on folks. But Christmas has retired. They live out yonder together, out there somewhere where that house is burning. And I have heard what they do to make a living. But that aint none of my business in the first place. And in the second place, most of what folks tells on other folks aint true to begin with. And so I reckon I aint no better than nobody else.”
She is watching him. She is not even blinking. “And he says his name is Brown.” It might have been a question, but she does not wait for an answer. “What kind of tales have you heard about what they do?”
“I would injure no man,” Byron says. “I reckon I ought not to talked so much. For a fact, it looks like a fellow is bound to get into mischief soon as he quits working.”
“What kind of tales?” she says. She has not moved. Her tone is quiet, but Byron is already in love, though he does not yet know it. He does not look at her, feeling her grave, intent gaze upon his face, his mouth.
“Some claim they are selling whiskey. Keeping it hid out there where that house is burning. And there is some tale about Brown was drunk downtown one Saturday night and he pretty near told something that ought not to been told, about him and Christmas in Memphis one night, or on a dark road close to Memphis, that had a pistol in it. Maybe two pistols. Because Christmas come in quick and shut Brown up and took him away. Something that Christmas didn’t want told, anyway, and that even Brown would have had better sense than to told if he hadn’t been drunk. That’s what I heard. I wasn’t there, myself.” When he raises his face now he finds that he has looked down again before he even met her eyes. He seems to have already a foreknowledge of something now irrevocable, not to be recalled, who had believed that out here at the mill alone on Saturday afternoon he would be where the chance to do hurt or harm could not have found him.
“What does he look like?” she says.
“Christmas? Why—”
“I don’t mean Christmas.”
“Oh. Brown. Yes. Tall, young. Dark complected; womenfolks calls him handsome, a right smart do, I hear tell. A big hand for laughing and frolicking and playing jokes on folks. But I ...” His voice ceases. He cannot look at her, feeling her steady, sober gaze upon his face.
“Joe Brown,” she says. “Has he got a little white scar right here by his mouth?”
And he cannot look at her, and he sits there on the stacked lumber when it is too late, and he could have bitten his tongue in two.