Light in August - William Faulkner [169]
“If the sheriff don’t find him first,” the old negress says. “Give it to him. He’ll find him, if he is above ground. Git your dollar and go on, boy.”
The negro had started away. He stops. He just stands there, saying nothing, looking at nothing. On the porch the negress sits, smoking, looking down at the white man’s weak, wolflike face: a face handsome, plausible, but drawn now by a fatigue more than physical, into a spent and vulpine mask. “I thought you was in a hurry,” she says.
“Yes,” Brown says. He takes a coin from his pocket. “Here. And if you bring me back the answer to that inside of an hour, I’ll give you five more like it.”
“Git on, nigger,” the woman says. “You ain’t got all day. You want the answer brought back here?”
For a moment longer Brown looks at her. Then again caution, shame, all flees from him. “No. Not here. Bring it to the top of the grade yonder. Walk up the track until I call to you. I’ll be watching you all the time too. Don’t you forget that. Do you hear?”
“You needn’t to worry,” the negress says. “He’ll git there with it and git back with the answer, if don’t nothing stop him. Git on, boy.”
The negro goes on. But something does stop him, before he has gone a half mile. It is another white man, leading a mule.
“Where?” Byron says. “Where did you see him?”
“Just now. Up yon at de house.” The white man goes on, leading the mule. The negro looks after him. He did not show the white man the note because the white man did not ask to see it. Perhaps the reason the white man did not ask to see the note was that the white man did not know that he had a note; perhaps the negro is thinking this, because for a while his face mirrors something terrific and subterraneous. Then it clears. He shouts. The white man turns, halting. “He ain’t dar now,” the negro shouts. “He say he gwine up ter de railroad grade to wait.”
“Much obliged,” the white man says. The negro goes on.
Brown returned to the track. He was not running now. He was saying to himself, ‘He won’t do it. He can’t do it. I know he can’t find him, can’t get it, bring it back. He called no names, thought no names. It seemed to him now that they were all just shapes like chessmen—the negro, the sheriff, the money, all—unpredictable and without reason moved here and there by an Opponent who could read his moves before he made them and who created spontaneous rules which he and not the Opponent, must follow. He was for the time being even beyond despair as he turned from the rails and entered the underbrush near the crest of the grade. He moved now without haste, gauging his distance as though there were nothing else in the world or in his life at least, save that. He chose his place and sat down, hidden from the track but where he himself could see it.
‘Only I know he won’t do it,’ he thinks. ‘I don’t even expect it. If I was to see him coming back with the money in his hand, I would not believe it. It wouldn’t be for me. I would know that. I would know that it was a mistake. I would say to him ‘You go on. You are looking for somebody else beside me. You ain’t looking for Lucas Burch. No, sir, Lucas Burch don’t deserve that money, that reward. He never done nothing to get it. No, sir.’ He begins to laugh, squatting, motionless, his spent face bent, laughing. ‘Yes, sir. All Lucas Burch wanted was justice. Just justice. Not that he told, them bastards the murderer’s name and where to find him only they wouldn’t try. They never tried because they would have had to give Lucas Burch the money. Justice.’ Then he says aloud, in a harsh, tearful voice: “Justice. That was all. Just my rights. And them bastards with their little tin stars, all sworn everyone of them on oath, to protect a American citizen.” He says it harshly, almost crying with rage and despair and fatigue: “I be dog if it ain’t enough to make a man turn downright bowlsheyvick.” Thus he hears no sound