Light in August - William Faulkner [48]
He was sitting in his splint chair in the doorway, the open book upon his knees. When she approached she saw that it was the Bible. But she just noticed this, as she might have noticed a fly upon his leg. “You hate him too,” she said “You’ve been watching him too. I’ve seen you. Don’t say you don’t.” He looked up at her face, the spectacles propped now above his brows. He was not an old man. In his present occupation he was an incongruity. He was a hard man, in his prime; a man who should have been living a hard and active life, and whom time, circumstance, something, had betrayed, sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of forty-five into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixty-five. “You know,” she said. “You knew before the other children started calling him Nigger. You came out here at the same time. You weren’t working here a month before that Christmas night when Charley found him on the doorstep yonder. Tell me.” The janitor’s face was round, a little flabby, quite dirty, with a dirty stubble. His eyes were quite clear, quite gray, quite cold. They were quite mad too. But the woman did not notice that. Or perhaps they did not look mad to her. So they faced one another in the coalgrimed doorway, mad eyes looking into mad eyes, mad voice talking to mad voice as calm and quiet and terse as two conspirators. “I’ve watched you for five years.” She believed that she was telling the truth. “Sitting here in this very chair, watching him. You never sit here except when the children are outdoors. But as soon as they come out, you bring this chair here to the door and sit in it where you can watch them. Watching him and hearing the other children calling him Nigger. That’s what you are doing. I know. You came here just to do that, to watch him and hate him. You were here ready when he came. Maybe you brought him and left him on the step yonder yourself. But anyway you know. And I’ve got to know. When he tells I will be fired. And Charley may—will—Tell me. Tell me, now.”
“Ah,” the janitor said. “I knowed he would be there to catch you when God’s time came. I knowed. I know who set him there, a sign and a damnation for bitchery.”
“Yes. He was right behind the curtain. As close as you are. You tell me, now. I’ve seen your eyes when you look at him. Watched you. For five years.”
“I know,” he said. “I know evil. Ain’t I made evil to get up and walk God’s world? A walking pollution in God’s own face I made it. Out of the mouths of little children He never concealed it. You have heard them. I never told them to say it, to call him in his rightful nature, by the name of his damnation. I never told them. They knowed. They was told, but it wasn’t by me. I just waited, on His own good time, when He would see fitten to reveal it to His living world. And it’s come now. This is the sign, wrote again in womansinning and bitchery.”
“Yes. But what must I do? Tell me.”
“Wait. Like I waited. Five years I waited for the Lord to move and show His will. And He done it. You wait too. When He is ready for it He will show His will to them that have the say-so.”
“Yes. The say-so.” They glared at one another, still, breathing quietly.
“The madam. When He is ready, He will reveal it to her.”
“You mean, if the madam knows, she will send him away? Yes. But I can’t wait.”
“No more can you hurry the Lord God. Ain’t I waited five years?”
She began to beat her hands lightly together. “But don’t you see? This may be the Lord’s way. For you to tell me. Because you know. Maybe it’s His way for you to tell me and me to tell the madam.” Her mad eyes were quite calm, her mad voice patient and calm: it was only her light unceasing hands.
“You’ll wait, the same as I waited,