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By Root 5639 0

along the quiet and remote and unpaved and little-used street would pause and read the sign and then look up at the small, brown, almost concealed house, and pass on; now and then the stranger would mention the sign to some acquaintance in the town. “Oh, yes,” the friend would say. “Hightower. He lives there by himself. He come here as minister of the Presbyterian church, but his wife went bad on him. She would slip off to Memphis now and then and have a good time. About twenty-five years ago, that was, right after he come here. Some folks claimed he knew about it. That he couldn’t or wouldn’t satisfy her himself and that he knew what she was doing. Then one Saturday night she got killed, in a house or something in Memphis. Papers full of it. He had to resign from the church, but he wouldn’t leave Jefferson, for some reason. They tried to get him to, for his own sake as well as the town’s, the church’s. That was pretty bad on the church, you see. Having strangers come here and hear about it, and him refusing to leave the town. But he wouldn’t go away. He has lived out there on what used to be the main street ever since, by himself. At least it ain’t a principal street anymore. That’s something. But then he don’t worry anybody anymore, and I reckon most folks have forgot about him. Does his own housework. I don’t reckon anybody’s even been inside that house in twenty-five years. We don’t know why he stays here. But any day you pass along there about dusk or nightfall, you can see him sitting in the window. Just sitting there. The rest of the time folks won’t hardly see him around the place at all, except now and then working in his garden.”

So the sign which he carpentered and lettered is even less to him than it is to the town; he is no longer conscious of it as a sign, a message. He does not remember it at all until he takes his place in the study window just before dusk. Then it is just a familiar low oblong shape without any significance at all, low at the street end of the shallow lawn; it too might have grown up out of the tragic and inescapable earth along with the low spreading maples and the shrubs, without help or hindrance from him. He no longer even looks at it, as he does not actually see the trees beneath and through which he watches the street, waiting for nightfall, the moment of night. The house, the study, is dark behind him, and he is waiting for that instant when all light has failed out of the sky and it would be night save for that faint light which daygranaried leaf and grass blade reluctant suspire, making still a little light on earth though night itself has come. Now, soon, he thinks; soon, now. He does not say even to himself: “There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.”

When Byron Bunch first came to Jefferson seven years and saw that little sign, Gail Hightower D.D. Art Lessons Christmas Cards Photographs Developed, he thought, D.D. What is D.D.,’ and he asked and they told him it meant Done Damned. Gail Hightower Done Damned in Jefferson anyway, they told him. And how Hightower had come straight to Jefferson from the seminary, refusing to accept any other call; how he had pulled every string he could in order to be sent to Jefferson. And how he arrived with his young wife, descending from the train in a state of excitement already, talking, telling the old men and women who were the pillars of the church how he had set his mind on Jefferson from the first, since he had first decided to become a minister; telling them with a kind of glee of the letters he had written and the worrying he had done and the influence he had used in order to be called here. To the people of the town it sounded like a horsetrader’s glee over an advantageous trade. Perhaps that is how it sounded to the elders. Because they listened to him with something cold and astonished and dubious, since he sounded like it was the town he desired to live in and not the church and the people who composed the church, that he wanted to serve. As if he did not care about the people, the living people, about whether