Light in August - William Faulkner [140]
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 all: “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