Light in August

  “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.” He watched Max, watching his face, hearing the waitress’ voice; the voice downlooking: “Not doing you nor nobody else any harm ... Not on his time ...” He was not watching her nor the blonde woman either. He was watching Max, with that expression puzzled, placative, not afraid. The blonde woman now spoke; it was as though they were speaking of him and in his presence and in a tongue which they knew that he did not know.

  “Come on out,” the blonde woman said.

  “For sweet Jesus,” Max said. “I was just going to give Romeo a drink on the house.”

  “Does he want one?” the blonde woman said. Even when she addressed Joe directly it was as if she still spoke to Max. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Don’t hold him in suspense because of his past behavior. Tell him it’s on the house.”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “I never tried it.”

  “Never tried anything on the house,” Max said. “For sweet Jesus.” He had not looked at Joe once again after he entered the room. Again it was as if they talked at and because of him, in a language which he did not understand.

  “Come on,” the blonde woman said. “Come on, now.”

  They went out. The blonde woman had never looked at him at all, and the man, without looking at him, had never ceased. Then they were gone. Joe stood beside the bureau. In the middle of the floor the waitress stood, downlooking, with the open box of candy in her hand. The room was close, smelling of stale scent. Joe had never seen it before. He had not believed that he ever would. The shades were drawn. The single bulb burned at the end of a cord, shaded by a magazine page pinned about it and already turned brown from the heat. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right.” She didn’t answer nor move. He thought of the darkness outside, the night in which they had been alone before. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Go?” she said. Then he looked at her. “Go where?” she said. “What for?” Still he did not understand her. He watched her come to the bureau and set the box of candy upon it. While he watched, she began to take her clothes off, ripping them off and flinging them down.

  He said, “Here? In here?” It was the first time he had ever seen a naked woman, though he had been her lover for a month. But even then he did not even know that he had not known what to expect to see.

  That night they talked. They lay in the bed, in the dark, talking. Or he talked, that is. All the time he was thinking, ‘Jesus. Jesus. So this is it. He lay naked too, beside her, touching her with his hand and talking about her. Not about where she had come from and what she had even done, but about her body as if no one had ever done this before, with her or with anyone else. It was as if with speech he were learning about women’s bodies, with the curiosity of a child. She told him about the sickness of the first night. It did not shock him now. Like the nakedness and the physical shape, it was like something which had never happened or existed before. So he told her in turn what he knew to tell. He told about the negro girl in the mill shed on that afternoon three years ago. He told her quietly and peacefully, lying beside her, touching her. Perhaps he could not even have said if she listened or not. Then he said, ‘You noticed my skin, my hair,” waiting for her to answer, his hand slow on her body.

  She whispered also. “Yes. I thought maybe you were a foreigner. That you never come from around here.”

  “It’s different from that, even. More than just a foreigner. You can’t guess.”

  “What? How more different?”

  “Guess.”

  Their voices were quiet. It was still, quiet; night now known, not to be desired, pined for. “I can’t. What are you?”

  His hand was slow and quiet on her invisible flank. He did not answer at once. It was not as if he were tantalising her. It was as if he just had not thought to speak on. She asked him again. Then he told her. “I got some nigger blood in me.”

  Then she lay perfectly still, with a different stillness. But he did not seem to notice it. He lay peacefully too, his hand slow up and down her flank. “You’re what?” she said.

  “I think I got some nigger blood in me.” His eyes were closed, his hand slow and unceasing. “I don’t know. I believe I have.”

  She did not move. She said at once: “You’re lying.”

  “All right,” he said, not moving, his hand not ceasing.

  “I don’t believe it,” her voice said in the darkness.

  “All right,” he said, his hand not ceasing.

  The next Saturday he took another half dollar from Mrs. McEachern’s hiding place and gave it to the waitress. A day or two later he had reason to believe that Mrs. McEachern had missed the money and that she suspected him of having taken it. Because she lay in wait for him until he knew that she knew that McEachern would not interrupt them. Then she said, “Joe.” He paused and looked at her, knowing that she would not be looking at him. She said, not looking at him, her voice flat, level: “I know how a young man growing up needs money. More than p—Mr. McEachern gives you. ...” He looked at her, until her voice ceased and died away. Apparently he was waiting for it to cease. Then he said,

  “Money? What do I want with money?”

  On the next Saturday he earned two dollars chopping wood for a neighbor. He lied to McEachern about where he was going and where he had been and what he had done there. He gave the money to the waitress. McEachern found out about the work. Perhaps he believed that Joe had hidden the money. Mrs. McEachern may have told him so.

  Perhaps two nights a week Joe and the waitress went to her room. He did not know at first that anyone else had ever done that. Perhaps he believed that some peculiar dispensation had been made in his favor, for his sake. Very likely until the last he still believed that Max and Mame had to be placated, not for the actual fact, but because of his presence there. But he did not see them again in the house, though he knew that they were there. But he did not know for certain if they knew that he was there or had ever returned after the night of the candy.

  Usually they met outside, went somewhere else or just loitered on the way to where she lived. Perhaps he believed up to the last that he had suggested it. Then one night she did not meet him where he waited. He waited until the clock in the courthouse struck twelve. Then he went on to where she lived. He had never done that before, though even then he could not have said that she had ever forbidden him to come there unless she was with him. But he went there that night, expecting to find the house dark and asleep. The house was dark, but it was not asleep. He knew that, that beyond the dark shades of her room people were not asleep and that she was not there alone. How he knew it he could not have said. Neither would he admit what he knew. ‘It’s just Max,’ he thought. ‘It’s just Max.’ But he knew better. He knew that there was a man in the room with her. He did not see her for two weeks, though he knew that she was waiting for him. Then one night he was at the corner when she appeared. He struck her, without warning, feeling her flesh. He knew then what even yet he had not believed. “Oh,” she cried. He struck her again. “Not here!” she whispered. “Not here!” Then he found that she was crying. He had not cried since he could remember. He cried, cursing her, striking her. Then she was holding him. Even the reason for striking her was gone then. “Now, now,” she said. “Now, now.”

  They did not leave the corner even that night. They did not walk on loitering nor leave the road. They sat on a sloping grassbank and talked. She talked this time, telling him. It did not take much telling. He could see now what he discovered that he had known all the time: the idle men in the restaurant, with their cigarettes bobbing as they spoke to her in passing, and she going back and forth, constant, downlooking, and abject. Listening to her voice, he seemed to smell the odorreek of all anonymous men above dirt. Her head was a little lowered as she talked, the big hands still on her lap. He could not see, of course. He did not have to see. “I thought you knew,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I reckon I didn’t.??
?

  “I thought you did”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t reckon I did.”

  Two weeks later he had begun to smoke, squinting his face against the smoke, and he drank too. He would drink at night with Max and Mame and sometimes three or four other men and usually another woman or two, sometimes from the town, but usually strangers who would come in from Memphis and stay a week or a month, as waitresses behind the restaurant counter where the idle men gathered all day. He did not always know their names, but he could cock his hat as they did; during the evenings behind the drawn shades of the diningroom at Max’s he cocked it so and spoke of the waitress to the others, even in her presence, in his loud, drunken, despairing young voice, calling her his whore. Now and then in Max’s car he took her to dances in the country, always careful that McEachern should not hear about it. “I don’t know which he would be madder at,” he told her; “at you or at the dancing.” Once they had to put him to bed, helpless, in the house where he had not even ever dreamed at one time that he could enter. The next morning the waitress drove him out home before daylight so he could get into the house before he was caught. And during the day McEachern watched him with dour and grudging approval.

  “But you have still plenty of time to make me regret that heifer,” McEachern said.

  Chapter 9

  McEACHERN lay in bed. The room was dark, but he was not asleep. He lay beside Mrs. McEachern, whom he did believe to be sleeping, thinking fast and hard, thinking, ‘The suit has been worn. But when. It could not have been during the day, because he is beneath my eyes, except on Saturday afternoons. But on any Saturday afternoon he could go to the barn, remove and hide the fit clothing which I require him to wear, and then don apparel which he would and could need only as some adjunct to sinning.’ It was as if he knew then, had been told. That would infer then that the garments were worn in secret, and therefore in all likelihood, at night. And if that were so, he refused to believe that the boy had other than one purpose: lechery. He had never committed lechery himself and he had not once failed to refuse to listen to anyone who talked about it. Yet within about thirty minutes of intensive thinking he knew almost as much of Joe’s doings as Joe himself could have told him, with the exception of names and places. Very likely he would not have believed those even from Joe’s mouth, since men of his kind usually have just as firmly fixed convictions about the mechanics, the theatring of evil as about those of good. Thus bigotry and clairvoyance were practically one, only the bigotry was a little slow, for as Joe, descending on his rope, slid like a fast shadow across the open and moonfilled window behind which McEachern lay, McEachern did not at once recognise him or perhaps believe what he saw, even though he could see the very rope itself. And when he got to the window Joe had already drawn the rope back and made it fast and was now on his way toward the barn. As McEachern watched him from the window, he felt something of that pure and impersonal outrage which a judge must feel were he to see a man on trial for his life lean and spit on the bailiff’s sleeve.

  Hidden in the shadows of the lane halfway between the house and the road, he could see Joe at the mouth of the lane. He too heard the car and saw it come up and stop and Joe get into it. Possibly he did not even care who else was in it. Perhaps he already knew, and his purpose had been merely to see in which direction it went. Perhaps he believed that he knew that too, since the car could have gone almost anywhere in a country full of possible destinations with roads that led to them. Because he turned now back toward the house, walking fast, in that same pure and impersonal outrage, as if he believed so that he would be guided by some greater and purer outrage that he would not even need to doubt personal faculties. In carpet slippers, without a hat, his nightshirt thrust into his trousers and his braces dangling, he went straight as an arrow to the stable and saddled his big, old, strong white horse and returned back down the lane and to the road at a heavy gallop, though Mrs. McEachern from the kitchen door called his name when he rode out of the lot. He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary.

  He rode at that same speed straight to the place which he sought and which he had found out of a whole night and almost a whole half of a county, though it was not that far distant. He had gone hardly four miles when he heard music ahead and then he saw beside the road lights in a school house, a oneroom building. He had known where the building was, but he had had neither reason nor manner of knowing that there would be a dance held in it. But he rode straight to it and into the random shadows of parked cars and buggies and saddled horses and mules which filled the grove which surrounded the school, and dismounted almost before the horse had stopped. He did not even tether it. He got down, and in the carpet slippers and the dangling braces and his round head and his short, blunt, outraged beard ran toward the open door and the open windows where the music came and where kerosenelit shadows passed in a certain orderly uproar.

  Perhaps, if he were thinking at all, he believed that he had been guided and were now being propelled by some militant Michael Himself as he entered the room. Apparently his eyes were not even momentarily at fault with the sudden light and the motion as he thrust among bodies with turned heads as, followed by a wake of astonishment and incipient pandemonium, he ran toward the youth whom he had adopted of his own free will and whom he had tried to raise as he was convinced was right. Joe and the waitress were dancing and Joe had not seen him yet. The woman had never seen him but once, but perhaps she remembered him, or perhaps his appearance now was enough. Because she stopped dancing and upon her face came an expression very like horror, which Joe saw and turned. As he turned, McEachern was upon them. Neither had McEachern ever seen the woman but once, and very likely then he had not looked at her, just as he had refused to listen when men spoke of fornication. Yet he went straight to her, ignoring Joe for the moment. “Away, Jezebel!” he said. His voice thundered, into the shocked silence, the shocked surrounding faces beneath the kerosene lamps, into the ceased music, into the peaceful moonlit night of young summer. “Away, harlot!”

  Perhaps it did not seem to him that he had been moving fast nor that his voice was loud. Very likely he seemed to himself to be standing just and rocklike and with neither haste nor anger while on all sides the sluttishness of weak human men seethed in a long sigh of terror about the actual representative of the wrathful and retributive Throne. Perhaps they were not even his hands which struck at the face of the youth whom he had nurtured and sheltered and clothed from a child, and perhaps when the face ducked the blow and came up again it was not the face of that child. But he could not have been surprised at that, since it was not that child’s face which he was concerned with: it was the face of Satan, which he knew as well. And when, staring at the face, he walked steadily toward it with his hand still raised, very likely he walked toward it in the furious and dreamlike exaltation of a martyr who has already been absolved, into the descending chair which Joe swung at his head, and into nothingness. Perhaps the nothingness astonished him a little, but not much, and not for long.

  Then to Joe it all rushed away, roaring, dying, leaving him in the center of the floor, the shattered chair clutched in his hand, looking down at his adopted father. McEachern lay on his back. He looked quite peaceful now. He appeared to sleep: bluntheaded, indomitable even in repose, even the blood on his forehead peaceful and quiet.

  Joe was breathing hard. He could hear it, and also something else, thin and shrill and far away. He seemed to listen to it for a long time before he recognised it for a voice, a woman’s voice. He looked and saw two men holding her and she writhing and struggling, her hair shaken forward, her white face wrung and ugly beneath the splotches of savage paint, her mou
th a small jagged hole filled with shrieking. “Calling me a harlot!” she screamed, wrenching at the men who held her. “That old son of a bitch! Let go! Let go!” Then her voice stopped making words again and just screamed; she writhed and threshed, trying to bite the hands of the men who struggled with her.

  Still carrying the shattered chair Joe walked toward her. About the walls, huddling, clotted, the others watched him the girls in stiff offcolors and mail-order stockings and heels; the men, young men in illcut and boardlike garments also from the mail-order, with hard, ruined hands and eyes already revealing a heritage of patient brooding upon endless furrows and the slow buttocks of mules. Joe began to run, brandishing the chair. “Let her go!” he said. At once she ceased struggling and turned on him the fury, the shrieking, as if she had just seen him, realised that he was also there.

  “And you! You brought me here. Goddamn bastard clodhopper. Bastard you! Son of a bitch you and him too. Putting him at me that never ever saw—” Joe did not appear to be running at anyone in particular, and his face was quite calm beneath the uplifted chair. The others fell back from about the woman, freeing her, though she continued to wrench her arms as if she did not yet realise it.

  “Get out of here!” Joe shouted. He whirled, swinging the chair; yet his face was still quite calm. “Back!” he said, though no one had moved toward him at all. They were all as still and as silent as the man on the floor. He swung the chair, backing now toward the door. “Stand back! I said I would kill him some day! I told him so!” He swung the chair about him, calmfaced, backing toward the door. “Don’t a one of you move, now,” he said, looking steadily and ceaselessly at faces that might have been masks. Then he flung the chair down and whirled and sprang out the door, into soft, dappled moonlight. He overtook the waitress as she was getting into the car in which they had come. He was panting, yet his voice was calm too: a sleeping face merely breathing hard enough to make sounds. “Get on back to town,” he said. “I’ll be there soon as I ...” Apparently he was not aware of what he was saying nor of what was happening; when the woman turned suddenly in the door of the car and began to beat him in the face he did not move, his voice did not change: “Yes. That’s right. I’ll be there soon as I—” Then he turned and ran, while she was still striking at him.