Light in August

Byron leads them into the study—a dumpy woman in a purple dress and a plume and carrying an umbrella, with a perfectly immobile face, and a man incredibly dirty and apparently incredibly old, with a tobaccostained goat’s beard and mad eyes. They enter not with diffidence, but with something puppetlike about them, as if they were operated by clumsy springwork. The woman appears to be the more assured, or at least the more conscious, of the two of them. It is as though, for all her frozen and mechanically moved inertia, she had come for some definite purpose or at least with some vague hope. But he sees at once that the man is in something like coma, as though oblivious and utterly indifferent to his whereabouts, and yet withal a quality latent and explosive, paradoxically rapt and alert at the same time.

“This is her,” Byron says quietly. “This is Mrs. Hines.” They stand there, motionless: the woman as though she had reached the end of a long journey and now among strange faces and surroundings waits, quiet, glacierlike, like something made of stone and painted, and the calm, rapt yet latently furious and dirty old man. It is as though neither of them had so much as looked at him, with curiosity or without. He indicates chairs. Byron guides the woman, who lowers herself carefully, clutching the umbrella. The man sits at once. Hightower takes his chair beyond the desk. “What is it she wants to talk to me about?” he says.

The woman does not move. Apparently she has not heard. She is like someone who has performed an arduous journey on the strength of a promise and who now ceases completely and waits. “This is him,” Byron says. “This is Reverend Hightower. Tell him. Tell him what you want him to know.” She looks at Byron when he speaks, her face quite blank. If there is inarticulateness behind it, articulateness is nullified by the immobility of the face itself; if hope or yearning, neither hope nor yearning show. “Tell him,” Byron says. “Tell him why you came. What you came to Jefferson for.”

“It was because—” she says. Her voice is sudden and deep, almost harsh, though not loud. It is as though she had not expected to make so much noise when she spoke; she ceases in a sort of astonishment as though at the sound of her own voice, looking from one to the other of the two faces.

“Tell me,” Hightower says. “Try to tell me.”

“It’s because I …” Again the voice ceases, dies harshly though still not raised, as though of its own astonishment. It is as if the three words were some automatic impediment which her voice ca

“Bitchery and abomination!” the man says suddenly. His voice is high, shrill, strong. “Bitchery and abomination!” Then he ceases. Out of his immediate and dreamlike state he shouts the three words with outrageous and prophetlike sudde

“He is their daughter’s child. He—” with a slight movement of the head he indicates the old man, who is now watching Hightower with his bright, mad glare—“he took it right after it was born and carried it away. She didn’t know what he did with it. She never even knew if it was still alive or not until—”

The old man interrupts again, with that startling sudde

“What’s this? What’s this?” he says.

“I wanted to fix it so she could come and talk to you without him being along,” Byron says. “But there wasn’t anywhere to leave him. She says she has to watch him. He was trying down in Mottstown yesterday to get the folks worked up to lynch him, before he even knew what he had done.”

“Lynch him?” Hightower says. “Lynch his own grandson?”

“That’s what she says,” Byron says levelly. “She says that’s what he come up here for. And she had to come, with him to keep him from doing it.”

The woman speaks again. Perhaps she has been listening. But there is no more expression on her face now than when she entered; woodenfaced, she speaks again in her dead voice, with almost the sudde

“That’s how I heard it too,” Byron says. “It was hard for me to get it straight too, at first. They were living at a sawmill that he was foreman of, over in Arkansas. The gal was about eighteen then. One night a circus passed the mill, on the way to town. It was December and there had been a lot of rain, and one of the wagons broke through a bridge close to the mill and the men come to their house to wake him up and borrow some log tackle to get the wagon out—”

“It’s God’s abomination of womanflesh!” the old man cries suddenly. Then his voice drops, lowers; it is as though he were merely gaining attention. He talks again rapidly, his tone plausible, vague, fanatic, speaking of himself again in the third person. “He knowed. Old Doc Hines knowed. He had seen the womansign of God’s abomination already on her, under her clothes. So when he went and put on his raincoat and lit the lantern and come back, she was already at the door, with a raincoat on too and he said, ‘You get on back to bed,’ and she said, ‘I want to go too,’ and he said, ‘You get on back inside that room,’ and she went back and he went down and got the big tackle from the mill and got the wagon out. Till nigh daybreak he worked, believing she had obeyed the command of the father the Lord had given her. But he ought to knowed. He ought to knowed God’s abomination of womanflesh; he should have knowed the walking shape of bitchery and abomination already stinking in God’s sight. Telling Old Doc Hines, that knowed better, that he was a Mexican. When Old Doc Hines could see in his face the black curse of God Almighty. Telling him—”