“Here’s a wagon going to town,” they tell her. “He will take you in.”
Her face wakes, serene, slow, warm. “Why, you’re right kind,” she says.
The wagon moves slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny loneliness of the enormous land it were outside of, beyond all time and all haste. From Varner’s store to Jefferson it is twelve miles. “Will we get there before dinner time?” she says.
The driver spits. “We mought,” he says.
Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon. Apparently she has never looked at him, either. She does not do so now. “I reckon you go to Jefferson a right smart.”
He says, “Some.” The wagon creaks on. Fields and woods seem to hang in some inescapable middle distance, at once static and fluid, quick, like mirages. Yet the wagon passes them.
“I reckon you don’t know anybody in Jefferson named Lucas Burch.”
“Burch?”
“I’m looking to meet him there. He works at the planing mill.”
“No,” the driver says. “I don’t know that I know him. But likely there is a right smart of folks in Jefferson I don’t know. Likely he is there.”
“I’ll declare, I hope so. Travelling is getting right bothersome.”
The driver does not look at her. “How far have you come, looking for him?”
“From Alabama. It’s a right far piece.”
He does not look at her. His voice is quite casual. “How did your folks come to let you start out, in your shape?”
“My folks are dead. I live with my brother. I just decided to come on.”
“I see. He sent you word to come to Jefferson.”
She does not answer. He can see beneath the sunbonnet her calm profile. The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels. The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap. She looks up at the sun. “I reckon it’s time to eat,” she says. He watches from the corner of his eye as she opens the cheese and crackers and the sardines and offers them.
“I wouldn’t care for none,” he says.
“I’d take it kind for you to share.”
“I wouldn’t care to. You go ahead and eat.”
She begins to eat. She eats slowly, steadily, sucking the rich sardine oil from her fingers with slow and complete relish. Then she stops, not abruptly, yet with utter completeness, her jaw stilled in midchewing, a bitten cracker in her hand and her face lowered a little and her eyes, blank, as if she were listening to something very far away or so near as to be inside her. Her face has drained of color, of its full, hearty blood, and she sits quite still, hearing and feeling the implacable and immemorial earth, but without fear or alarm. ‘It’s twins at least,’ she says to herself, without lip movement, without sound. Then the spasm passes. She eats again. The wagon has not stopped; time has not stopped. The wagon crests the final hill and they see smoke.
“Jefferson,” the driver says.
“Well, I’ll declare,” she says. “We are almost there, ain’t we?”
It is the man now who does not hear. He is looking ahead, across the valley toward the town on the opposite ridge. Following his pointing whip, she sees two columns of smoke: the one the heavy density of burning coal above a tall stack, the other a tall yellow column standing apparently from among a clump of trees some distance beyond the town. “That’s a house burning,” the driver says. “See?”
But she in turn again does not seem to be listening, to hear. “My, my,” she says; “here I ain’t been on the road but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already. My, my. A body does get around.”
Chapter 2
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 won’t 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 won’t have on them Sunday clothes when he comes to work in the morning.”