Light in August - William Faulkner [50]
He still wore the overalls and he now wore his hat. He did not remove it. Again his cold mad gray eyes did not seem to see her, to look at her at all. “If the Lord Himself come into the room of one of you,” he said, “you would believe He come in bitchery.” He said, “Have you told her ?”
The woman sat on the bed. She seemed to sink slowly back upon it, clutching the garment, watching him, her face blanched. “Told her?”
“What will she do with him?”
“Do?” She watched him: those bright, still eyes that seemed not to look at her so much as to envelop her. Her mouth hung open like the mouth of an idiot.
“Where will they send him to?” She didn’t answer. “Don’t lie to me, to the Lord God. They’ll send him to the one for niggers.” Her mouth closed; it was as if she had discovered at last what he was talking about. “Ay, I’ve thought it out. They’ll send him to the one for nigger children.” She didn’t answer, but she was watching him now, her eyes still a little fearful but secret too, calculating. Now he was looking at her.; his eyes seemed to contract upon her shape and being. “Answer me, Jezebel!” he shouted.
“Shhhhhhhhh!” she said. “Yes. They’ll have to. When they find ...”
“Ah,” he said. His gaze faded; the eyes released her and enveloped her again. Looking at them, she seemed to see herself as less than nothing in them, trivial as a twig floating upon a pool. Then his eyes became almost human. He began to look about the womanroom as if he had never seen one before: the close room, warm, littered, womanpinksmelling. “Womanfilth,” he said. “Before the face of God.” He turned and went out. After a while the woman rose. She stood for a time, clutching the garment, motionless, idiotic, staring at the empty door as if she could not think what to tell herself to do. Then she ran. She sprang to the door, flinging herself upon it, crashing it to and locking it, leaning against it, panting, clutching the turned key in both hands.
At breakfast time the next morning the janitor and the child were missing. No trace of them could be found. The police were notified at once. A side door was found to be unlocked, to which the janitor had a key.
“It’s because he knows,” the dietitian told the matron.
“Knows what?”
“That that child, that Christmas boy, is a nigger.”
“A what?” the matron said. Backthrust in her chair, she glared at the younger woman. “A ne—I don’t believe it!” she cried. “I don’t believe it!”
“You don’t have to believe it,” the other said. “But he knows it. He stole him away because of it.”
The matron was past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes. “I don’t believe it!” she said. But on the third day she sent for the dietitian. She looked as if she had not slept in some time. The dietitian, on the contrary, was quite fresh, quite serene. She was still unshaken when the matron told her the news, that the man and the child had been found. “At Little Rock,” the matron said. “He tried to put the child into an orphanage there. They thought he was crazy and held him until the police came.” She looked at the younger woman. “You told me ... The other day you said ... How did you know about this?”
The dietitian did not look away. “I didn’t. I had no idea at all. Of course I knew it didn’t mean anything when the other children called him Nigger—”
“Nigger?” the matron said. “The other children?”
“They have been calling him Nigger for years. Sometimes I think that children have a way of knowing things that grown people of your and my age don’t see. Children, and old people like him, like that old man. That’s why he always sat in the door yonder while they were playing in the yard: watching that child. Maybe he found it out from hearing the other children call him Nigger. But he might have known beforehand. If you remember, they came here about the same time. He hadn’t been working here hardly a month before the night—that Christmas, don’t you remember—when Ch—they found the baby on the doorstep?” She spoke smoothly, watching the baffled, shrinking eyes