Light in August

The cabin is empty save for the mother and child. She is propped up on the cot, the child at breast. As Hightower enters, she is in the act of drawing the sheet up over her bared bosom, watching the door not with alarm at all, but with alertness, her face fixed in an expression serene and warm, as though she were about to smile. He sees this fade. I thought—” she says.

“Who did you think?” he says, booms. He comes to the cot and looks down at her, at the tiny, weazened, terracotta face of the child which seems to hang suspended without body and still asleep from the breast. Again she draws the sheet closer, modest and tranquil, while above her the gaunt, paunched, bald man stands with an expression on his face gentle, beaming, and triumphant. She is looking down at the child.

“It looks like he just can’t get caught up. I think he is asleep again and I lay him down and then he hollers and I have to put him back again.”

“You ought not to be here alone,” he says. He looks about the room. “Where—”

“She’s gone, too. To town. She didn’t say, but that’s where she has gone. He slipped out, and when she woke up she asked me where he was and I told her he went out, and she followed him.”

“To town? Slipped out?” Then he says “Oh” quietly. His face is grave now.

“She watched him all day. And he was watching her. I could tell it. He was making out like he was asleep. She thought that he was asleep. And so after di

Hightower stands over the cot. He does not seem to see her. His face is very grave; it is almost as though it had grown ten years older while he stood there. Or like his face looks now as it should look and that when he entered the room, it had been a stranger to itself. “To town,” he says. Then his eyes wake, seeing again. “Well. It can’t be helped now,” he says. “Besides, the men downtown, the sane … there will be a few of them. … Why are you glad they are gone?”

She looks down. Her hand moves about the baby’s head, not touching it: a gesture instinctive, u

“Mixed up?”

“She keeps on talking about him like his pa was that … the one in jail, that Mr. Christmas. She keeps on, and then I get mixed up and it’s like sometimes I can’t—like I am mixed up too and I think that his pa is that Mr.—Mr. Christmas too—” She watches him; it is as though she makes a tremendous effort of some kind. “But I know that ain’t so. I know that’s foolish. It’s because she keeps on saying it and saying it, and maybe I ain’t strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid. …”

“Of what?”

“I don’t like to get mixed up. And I. am afraid she might get me mixed up, like they say how you might cross your eyes and then you can’t uncross …” She stops looking at him. She does not move. She can feel him watching her.

“You say the baby’s name is not Joe. What is his name?”

For a moment longer she does not look at Hightower. Then she looks up. She says, too immediately, too easily: “I ain’t named him yet.”

And he knows why. It is as though he sees her for the first time since he entered. He notices for the first time that her hair has been recently combed and that she has freshened her face too, and he sees, half hidden by the sheet, as if she had thrust them hurriedly there when he entered, a comb and a shard of broken mirror. “When I came in, you were expecting someone. And it was not me. Who were you expecting?”

She does not look away. Her face is neither i

“Was it Byron Bunch you expected?” Still she does not look away. Hightower’s face is sober, firm, gentle. Yet in it is that ruthlessness which she has seen in the faces of a few good people, men usually, whom she has known. He leans forward and lays his hand on hers where it supports the child’s body. “Byron is a good man,” he says.

“I reckon I know that, well as anybody. Better than most.”

“And you are a good woman. Will be. I don’t mean—” he says quickly. Then he ceases. “I didn’t mean—”

“I reckon I know,” she says.

“No. Not this, This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward. With yourself. With others.” He looks at her; she does not look away. “Let him go. Send him away from you.” They look at one another. “Send him away, daughter. You are probably not much more than half his age. But you have already outlived him twice over. He will never overtake you, catch up with you, because he has wasted too much time. And that too, his nothing, is as irremediable as your all. He can no more ever cast back and do, than you can cast back and undo. You have a manchild that is not his, by a man that is not him. You will be forcing into his life two men and only the third part of a woman, who deserves at the least that the nothing with which he has lived for thirty-five years be violated, if violated it must be, without two witnesses. Send him away.”

“That ain’t for me to do. He is free. Ask him. I have not tried once to hold him.”

“That’s it. You probably could not have held him, if you had tried to. That’s it. If you had known how to try. But then, if you had known that, you would not be here in this cot, with this child at your breast. And you won’t send him away? You won’t say the word?”

“I can say no more than I have said. And I said No to him five days ago.”

“No?”

“He said for me to marry him. To not wait. And I said No.”

“Would you say No now?”

She looks at him steadily. “Yes. I would say it now.”

He sighs, huge, shapeless; his face is again slack, weary. “I believe you. You will continue to say it until after you have seen …” He looks at her again; again his gaze is intent, hard. “Where is he? Byron?”

She looks at him. After a while she says quietly: “I don’t know.” She looks at him; suddenly her face is quite empty, as though something which gave it actual solidity and firmness were begi