“Some of the folks stayed, even after that. They could look in the window and see them setting there in the dark. Maybe they could see the plume, and the white of Uncle Doc’s head. And then Uncle Doc begun to wake up. It wasn’t like he was surprised to find where he was, nor that he was where he didn’t want to be. He just roused up, like he had been coasting for a long time now, and now was the time to put on the power again. They could hear her saying ‘Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhh,’ to him, and then his voice would break out. They were still setting there when the agent turned on the lights and told them that the two o’clock train was coming, with her saying ‘Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhhh’ like to a baby, and Uncle Doc hollering, ‘Bitchery and abomination! Abomination and bitchery!’ ”
Chapter 16
When his knock gets no response, Byron leaves the porch and goes around the house and enters the small, enclosed back yard. He sees the chair at once beneath the mulberry tree. It is a canvas deck chair, mended and faded and sagged so long to the shape of Hightower’s body that even when empty it seems to hold still in ghostly embrace the owner’s obese shapelessness; approaching, Byron thinks how the mute chair evocative of disuse and supineness and shabby remoteness from the world, is somehow the symbol and the being too of the man himself. That I am going to disturb again,’ he thinks, with that faint lift of lip, thinking Again? The disturbing I have done him, even he will see that that disturbing is nothing now. And on Sunday again.. But then I reckon Sunday would want to take revenge on him too, being as Sunday was invented by folks.
He comes up behind the chair and looks down into it. Hightower is asleep. Upon the swell of his paunch, where the white shirt (it is a clean and fresh one now) balloons out of the worn black trousers, an open book lies face down. Upon the book Hightower’s hands are folded, peaceful, benignant, almost pontifical. The shirt is made after an old fashion, with a pleated though carelessly ironed bosom, and he wears no collar. His mouth is open, the loose and flabby flesh sagging away from the round orifice in which the stained lower teeth show, and from the still fine nose which alone age, the defeat of sheer years, has not changed. Looking down at the unconscious face, it seems to Byron as though the whole man were fleeing away from the nose which holds invincibly to something yet of pride and courage above the sluttishness of vanquishment like a forgotten flag above a ruined fortress. Again light, the reflection of sky beyond the mulberry leaves, glints and glares upon the spectacle lenses, so that Byron cannot tell just when Hightower’s eyes open. He sees only the mouth shut, and a movement of the folded hands as Hightower sits up. “Yes,” he says; “yes? Who is– Oh, Byron.”
Byron looks down at him, his face quite grave. But it is not compassionate now. It is not anything: it is just quite sober and quite determined. He says, without any inflection at alclass="underline" “They caught him yesterday. I don’t reckon you have heard that any more than you heard about the killing.”
“Caught him?”
“Christmas. In Mottstown. He came to town, and near as I can learn, he stood around on the street until somebody recognised him.”
“Caught him.” Hightower is sitting up in the chair now. “And you have come to tell me that he is—that they have …”
“No. Ain’t anybody done anything to him yet. He ain’t dead yet. He’s in the jail. He’s all right.”
“All right. You say that he is all right. Byron says that he is all right—Byron Bunch has helped the woman’s paramour sell his friend for a thousand dollars, and Byron says that it is all right. Has kept the woman hidden from the father of her child, while that—Shall I say, other paramour, Byron? Shall I say that? Shall I refrain from the truth because Byron Bunch hides it?”
“If public talking makes truth, then I reckon that is truth. Especially when they find out that I have got both of them locked up in jail.”
“Both of them?’
“Brown too. Though I reckon most folks have about decided that Brown wasn’t anymore capable of doing that killing or helping in it than he was in catching the man that did do it or helping in that. But they can all say that Byron Bunch has now got him locked up safe in jail.”
“Ah, yes.” Hightower’s voice shakes a little, high and thin. “Byron Bunch, the guardian of public weal and morality. The gainer, the inheritor of rewards, since it will now descend upon the morganatic wife of– Shall I say that too? Shall I read Byron there too?” Then he begins to cry, sitting huge and lax in the sagging chair. “I don’t mean that. You know I don’t. But it is not right to bother me, to worry me, when I have—when I have taught myself to stay—have been taught by them to stay– That this should come to me, taking me after I am old, and reconciled to what they deemed—” Once before Byron saw him sit while sweat ran down his face like tears; now he sees the tears themselves run down the flabby cheeks like sweat.
“I know. It’s a poor thing. A poor thing to worry you. I didn’t know. I didn’t know, when I first got into it. Or I would have … But you are a man of God. You can’t dodge that.”
“I am not a man of God. And not through my own desire. Remember that. Not of my own choice that I am no longer a man of God. It was by the will, the more than behest, of them like you and like her and like him in the jail yonder and like them who put him there to do their will upon, as they did upon me, with insult and violence upon those who like them were created by the same God and were driven by them to do that which they now turn and rend them for having done it. It was not my choice. Remember that.”
“I know that. Because a man ain’t given that many choices. You made your choice before that.” Hightower looks at him. “You were given your choice before I was born, and you took it before I or her or him either was born. That was your choice. And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad. The same as her, and him, and me. And the same as them others, that other woman.”
“That other woman? Another woman? Must my life after fifty years be violated and my peace destroyed by two lost women, Byron?”
“This other one ain’t lost now. She has been lost for thirty years. But she is found now. She’s his grandmother.”
“Whose grandmother?”
“Christmas’,” Byron says.
Waiting, watching the street and the gate from the dark study window, Hightower hears the distant music when it first begins. He does not know that he expects it, that on each Wednesday and Sunday night, sitting in the dark window, he waits for it to begin. He knows almost to the second when he should begin to hear it, without recourse to watch or clock. He uses neither, has needed neither for twenty-five years now. He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it. It is as though out of his subconscious he produces without volition the few crystallizations of stated instances by which his dead life in the actual world had been governed and ordered once. Without recourse to clock he could know immediately upon the thought just where, in his old life, he would be and what doing between the two fixed moments which marked the beginning and the end of Sunday morning service and Sunday evening service and prayer service on Wednesday night; just when he would have been entering the church, just when he would have been bringing to a calculated close prayer or sermon. So before twilight has completely faded he is saying to himself Now they are gathering, approaching along streets slowly and turning in, greeting one another: the groups, the couples, the single ones. There is a little informal talking in the church itself, lowtoned, the ladies constant and a link sibilant with fans, nodding to arriving friends as they pass in the aisle. Miss Carruthers (she was his organist and she has been dead almost twenty years) is among them; soon she will rise and enter the organloft Sunday evening prayer meeting. It has seemed to him always that at that hour man approaches nearest of all to God, nearer than at any other hour of all the seven days. Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.