Light in August - William Faulkner [8]
“Why, it’s right kind of her,” she said. “But I won’t need it. I’m so nigh there now.”
“I reckon you better keep it. I reckon you done noticed how Martha ain’t much on being crossed in what she aims to do.”
“It’s right kind,” Lena said. She tied the money up in the bandanna bundle and put on the sunbonnet. The wagon was waiting. When they drove down the lane, past the house, she looked back at it. “It was right kind of you all,” she said.
“She done it,” Armstid said. “I reckon I can’t claim no credit.”
“It was right kind, anyway. You’ll have to say goodbye to her for me. I had hopened to see her myself, but …”
“Sho,” Armstid said. “I reckon she was busy or something. I’ll tell her.”
They drove up to the store in the early sunlight, with the squatting men already spitting across the heelgnawed porch, watching her descend slowly and carefully from the wagon seat, carrying the bundle and the fan. Again Armstid did not move to assist her. He said from the seat: “This here is Miz Burch. She wants to go to Jefferson. If anybody is going in today, she will take it kind to ride with them.”
She reached the earth, in the heavy, dusty shoes. She looked up at him, serene, peaceful. “It’s been right kind,” she said.
“Sho,” Armstid said. “I reckon you can get to town now.” He looked down at her. Then it seemed an interminable while that he watched his tongue seek words, thinking quiet and swift, thought fleeing A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and well-doing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle. Then his tongue found words, he listening, perhaps with the same astonishment that she did: “Only I wouldn’t set too much store by ... store in ...” thinking She is not listening. If she could hear words like that she would not be getting down from this wagon, with that belly and that fan and that little bundle, alone, bound for a place she never saw before and hunting for a man she ain’t going to ever see again and that she has already seen one time too many as it is. “—any time you are passing back this way, tomorrow or even tonight …”
“I reckon I’ll be all right now,” she said. “They told me he is there.”
He turned the wagon and drove back home, sitting hunched, bleacheyed, on the sagging seat, thinking, ‘It wouldn’t have done any good. She would not have believed the telling and hearing it any more than she will believe the thinking that’s been going on all around her for ... It’s four weeks now, she said. No more than she will feel it and believe it now. Setting there on that top step, with her hands in her lap and them fellows squatting there and spitting past her into the road. And not even waiting for them to ask her about it before she begins to tell. Telling them of her own accord about that durn fellow like she never had nothing particular to either hide or tell, even when Jody Varner or some of them will tell her that that fellow in Jefferson at the planing mill is named Bunch and not Burch; and that not worrying her either. I reckon she knows more than even Martha does, like when she told Martha last night about how the Lord will see that what is right will get done.’
It required only one or two questions. Then, sitting on the top step, the fan and the bundle upon her lap, Lena tells her story again, with that patient and transparent recapitulation of a lying child, the squatting overalled men listening quietly.
“That fellow’s name is Bunch,” Varner says. “He’s been working there at the mill about seven years. How do you know that Burch is there too?”
She is looking away up the road, in the direction of Jefferson. Her face is calm, waiting, a little detached without being bemused. “I reckon he’ll be there. At that planing mill and all. Lucas always did like excitement. He