Light in August - William Faulkner [120]
“It’s me, Reverend,” Byron says.
“I recognised you,” Hightower says. “Even though you didn’t stumble on the bottom step this time. You have entered this house on Sunday night, but until tonight you have never entered it without stumbling on the bottom step, Byron.” This was the note upon which Byron’s calls usually opened: this faintly overbearing note of levity and warmth to put the other at his ease, and on the part of the caller that slow and countrybred diffidence which is courtesy. Sometimes it would seem to Hightower that he would actually hale Byron into the house by a judicious application of pure breath, as though Byron wore a sail.
But this time Byron is already entering, before Hightower has finished his sentence. He enters immediately, with that new air born somewhere between assurance and defiance. “And I reckon you are going to find that you hate it worse when I don’t stumble than when I do,” Byron says.
“Is that a hope, or is it a threat, Byron?”
“Well, I don’t mean it to be a threat,” Byron says.
“Ah,” Hightower says. “In other words, you can offer no hope. Well, I am forewarned, at least. I was forewarned as soon as I saw you in the street light. But at least you are going to tell me about it. What you have already done, even if you didn’t see fit to talk about it beforehand.” They are moving toward the study door. Byron stops; he looks back and up at the taller face.
“Then you know,” he says. “You have already heard.” Then, though his head has not moved, he is no longer looking at the other. “Well,” he says. He says: “Well, any man has got a free tongue. Woman too. But I would like to know who told you. Not that I am ashamed. Not that I aimed to keep it from you. I come to tell you myself, when I could.”
They stand just without the door to the lighted room. Hightower sees now that Byron’s arms are laden with bundles, parcels that look like they might contain groceries. “What?” Hightower says. “What have you come to tell me?—But come in. Maybe I do know what it is already. But I want to see your face when you tell me. I forewarn you too, Byron.” They enter the lighted room. The bundles are groceries: he has bought and carried too many like them himself not to know. “Sit down,” he says.
“No,” Byron says. “I ain’t going to stay that long.” He stands, sober, contained, with that air compassionate still, but decisive without being assured, confident without being assertive: that air of a man about to do something which someone dear to him will not understand and approve, yet which he himself knows to be right just as he knows that the friend will never see it so. He says: “You ain’t going to like it. But there ain’t anything else to do. I wish you could see it so. But I reckon you can’t. And I reckon that’s all there is to it.”
Across the desk, seated again, Hightower watches him gravely. “What have you done, Byron?”
Byron speaks in that new voice: that voice brief, terse, each word definite of meaning, not fumbling. “I took her out there this evening. I had already fixed up the cabin, cleaned it good. She is settled now. She wanted it so. It was the nearest thing to a home he ever had and ever will have, so I reckon she is entitled to use it, especially as the owner ain’t using it now. Being detained elsewhere, you might say. I know you ain’t going to like it. You can name lots of reasons, good ones. You’ll say it ain’t his cabin to give to her. All right. Maybe it ain’t. But it ain’t any living man or woman in this country or state to say she can’t use it. You’ll say that in her shape she ought to have a woman with her. All right. There is a nigger woman, one old enough to be sensible, that don’t live over two hundred yards away. She can call to her without getting up from the chair or the bed. You’ll say, but that ain’t a white woman. And I’ll ask you what will she be getting from the white women in Jefferson about