Light in August - William Faulkner [159]
“I don’t like to get mixed up. And I. am afraid she might get me mixed up, like they say how you might cross your eyes and then you can’t uncross …” She stops looking at him. She does not move. She can feel him watching her.
“You say the baby’s name is not Joe. What is his name?”
For a moment longer she does not look at Hightower. Then she looks up. She says, too immediately, too easily: “I ain’t named him yet.”
And he knows why. It is as though he sees her for the first time since he entered. He notices for the first time that her hair has been recently combed and that she has freshened her face too, and he sees, half hidden by the sheet, as if she had thrust them hurriedly there when he entered, a comb and a shard of broken mirror. “When I came in, you were expecting someone. And it was not me. Who were you expecting?”
She does not look away. Her face is neither innocent nor dissimulating. Neither is it placid and serene. “Expecting?”
“Was it Byron Bunch you expected?” Still she does not look away. Hightower’s face is sober, firm, gentle. Yet in it is that ruthlessness which she has seen in the faces of a few good people, men usually, whom she has known. He leans forward and lays his hand on hers where it supports the child’s body. “Byron is a good man,” he says.
“I reckon I know that, well as anybody. Better than most.”
“And you are a good woman. Will be. I don’t mean—” he says quickly. Then he ceases. “I didn’t mean—”
“I reckon I know,” she says.
“No. Not this, This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward. With yourself. With others.” He looks at her; she does not look away. “Let him go. Send him away from you.” They look at one another. “Send him away, daughter. You are probably not much more than half his age. But you have already outlived him twice over. He will never overtake you, catch up with you, because he has wasted too much time. And that too, his nothing, is as irremediable as your all. He can no more ever cast back and do, than you can cast back and undo. You have a manchild that is not his, by a man that is not him. You will be forcing into his life two men and only the third part of a woman, who deserves at the least that the nothing with which he has lived for thirty-five years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away.”
“That ain’t for me to do. He is free. Ask him. I have not tried once to hold him.”
“That’s it. You probably could not have held him, if you had tried to. That’s it. If you had known how to try. But then, if you had known that, you would not be here in this cot, with this child at your breast. And you won’t send him away? You won’t say the word?”
“I can say no more than I have said. And I said No to him five days ago.”
“No?”
“He said for me to marry him. To not wait. And I said No.”
“Would you say No now?”
She looks at him steadily. “Yes. I would say it now.”
He sighs, huge, shapeless; his face is again slack, weary. “I believe you. You will continue to say it until after you have seen ...” He looks at her again; again his gaze is intent, hard. “Where is he? Byron?”
She looks at him. After a while she says quietly: “I don’t know.” She looks at him; suddenly her face is quite empty, as though something which gave it actual solidity and firmness were beginning to drain out of it. Now there is nothing of dissimulation nor alertness nor caution in it. “This morning about ten o’clock he came back. He didn’t come in. He just came to the door and he stood there and he just looked at me. And I hadn’t seen him since last night and he hadn’t seen the baby and I said, ‘Come and see him,’ and he looked at me, standing there in the door, and he said, ‘I come to find out when you want to see him,’ and I said, ‘See who?’ and he said, ‘They may have to send a deputy with him but I can persuade Kennedy to let him come,’ and I said, ‘Let who come?’ and he said, ‘Lucas Bunch,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘This evening? Will that do?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he went away. He just stood there, and then