“I can say no more than I have said. And I said No to him five days ago.”
“No?”
“He said for me to marry him. To not wait. And I said No.”
“Would you say No now?”
She looks at him steadily. “Yes. I would say it now.”
He sighs, huge, shapeless; his face is again slack, weary. “I believe you. You will continue to say it until after you have seen ...” He looks at her again; again his gaze is intent, hard. “Where is he? Byron?”
She looks at him. After a while she says quietly: “I don’t know.” She looks at him; suddenly her face is quite empty, as though something which gave it actual solidity and firmness were beginning to drain out of it. Now there is nothing of dissimulation nor alertness nor caution in it. “This morning about ten o’clock he came back. He didn’t come in. He just came to the door and he stood there and he just looked at me. And I hadn’t seen him since last night and he hadn’t seen the baby and I said, ‘Come and see him,’ and he looked at me, standing there in the door, and he said, ‘I come to find out when you want to see him,’ and I said, ‘See who?’ and he said, ‘They may have to send a deputy with him but I can persuade Kennedy to let him come,’ and I said, ‘Let who come?’ and he said, ‘Lucas Bunch,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘This evening? Will that do?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he went away. He just stood there, and then he went away.” While he watches her with that despair of all men in the presence of female tears, she begins to cry. She sits upright, the child at her breast, crying, not loud and not hard, but with a patient and hopeless abjectness, not hiding her face. “And you worry me about if I said No or not and I already said No and you worry me and worry me and now he is already gone. I will never see him again.” And he sits there, and she bows her head at last, and he rises and stands over her with his hand on her bowed head, thinking Thank God, God help me. Thank God, God help me.
He found Christmas’ old path through the woods to the mill. He did not know that it was there, but when he found in which direction it ran, it seemed like an omen to him in his exultation. He believes her, but he wants to corroborate the information for the sheer pleasure of hearing it again. It is just four o’clock when he reaches the mill. He inquires at the office.
“Bunch?” the bookkeeper, says. “You won’t find him here. He quit this morning.”
“I know, I know,” Hightower says.
“Been with the company for seven years, Saturday evenings too. Then this morning he walked in and said he was quitting. No reason. But that’s the way these hillbillies do.”
“Yes, yes,” Hightower says. “They are fine people, though. Fine men and women.” He leaves the office. The road to town passes the planer shed, where Byron worked. He knows Mooney, the foreman. “I hear Byron Bunch is not with you anymore,” he says, pausing.
“Yes,” Mooney says. “He quit this morning.” But Hightower is not listening; the overalled men watch the shabby, queershaped, not-quite-familiar figure looking with a kind of exultant interest at the walls, the planks, the cryptic machinery whose very being and purpose he could not have understood or even learned. “If you want to see him,” Mooney says, “I reckon you’ll find him downtown at the courthouse.”
“At the courthouse?”
“Yes, sir. Grand jury meets today. Special call. To indict that murderer.”
“Yes, yes,” Hightower says. “So he is gone. Yes. A fine young man. Goodday, goodday, gentlemen. Goodday to you.” He goes on, while the men in overalls look after him for a time. His hands are clasped behind him. He paces on, thinking quietly, peacefully, sadly: ‘Poor man. Poor fellow. No man is, can be, justified in taking human life; least of all, a warranted officer, a sworn servant of his fellowman. When it is sanctioned publicly in the person of an elected officer who knows that he has not himself suffered at the hands of his victim, call that victim by what name you will, how can we expect an individual to refrain when he believes that he has suffered at the hands of his victim?’ He walks on; he is now in his own street. Soon he can see his fence, the signboard; then the house beyond the rich foliage of August. ‘So he departed without coming to tell me goodbye. After all he has done for me. Fetched to me. Ay; given, restored, to me. It would seem that this too was reserved for me. And this must be all.’
But it is not all. There is one thing more reserved for him.
Chapter 18
WHEN Byron reached town he found that he could not see the sheriff until noon, since the sheriff would be engaged all morning with the special Grand Jury. “You’ll have to wait,” they told him.
“Yes,” Byron said. “I know how.”
“Know how what?” But he did not answer. He left the sheriff’s office and stood beneath the portico which faced the south side of the square. From the shallow, flagged terrace the stone columns rose, arching, weathered, stained with generations of casual tobacco. Beneath them, steady and constant and with a grave purposelessness (and with here and there, standing motionless or talking to one another from the sides of their mouths, some youngish men, townsmen, some of whom Byron knew as clerks and young lawyers and even merchants, who had a generally identical authoritative air, like policemen in disguise and not especially caring if the disguise hid the policeman or not) countrymen in overalls moved, with almost the air of monks in a cloister, speaking quietly among themselves of money and crops, looking quietly now and then upward at the ceiling beyond which the Grand Jury was preparing behind locked doors to take the life of a man whom few of them had ever seen to know, for having taken the life of a woman whom even fewer of them had known to see. The wagons and the dusty cars in which they had come to town were ranked about the square, and along the streets and in and out of the stores the wives and daughters who had come to town with them moved in clumps, slowly and also aimlessly as cattle or clouds. Byron stood there for quite a while, motionless, not leaning against anything—a small man who had lived in the town seven years yet whom even fewer of the country people than knew either the murderer or the murdered, knew by name or habit.
Byron was not conscious of this. He did not care now, though a week ago it would have been different. Then he would not have stood here, where any man could look at him and perhaps recognise him: Byron Bunch, that weeded another man’s laidby crop, without any halvers. The fellow that took care of another man’s whore while the other fellow was busy making a thousand dollars. And got nothing for it. Byron Bunch that protected her good name when the woman that owned the good name and the man she had given it to had both thrown it away, that got the other fellow’s bastard born in peace and quiet and at Byron Bunch’s expense, and heard a baby cry once for his pay. Got nothing for it except permission to fetch the other fellow back to her soon as he got done collecting the thousand dollars and Byron wasn’t needed anymore. Byron Bunch ‘And now I can go away,’ he thought. He began to breathe deep. He could feel himself breathing deep, as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen, and that all the time he could look down at himself breathing, at his chest, and see no movement at all, like when dynamite first begins, gathers itself for the now Now NOW, the shape of the outside of the stick does not change; that the people who passed and looked at him could see no change: a small man you would not look at twice, that you would never believe he had done what he had done and felt what he had felt, who had believed that out there at the mill on a Saturday afternoon, alone, the chance to be hurt could not have found him.