Light in August by William Faulkner Page B

falling from his gaunt shoulders of its own weight, upon his lap. Then Byron says, “You aint heard yet.” The other watches him. He says, in a musing tone: “That would be for me to do too. To tell on two days to two folks something they aint going to want to hear and that they hadn’t ought to have to hear at all.”
    “What is this that you think I will not want to hear? What is it that I have not heard?”
    “Not the fire,” Byron says. “They got out of the fire all right.”
    “They? I understood that Miss Burden lived there alone.”
    Again Byron looks at the other for a moment. But Hightower’s face is merely grave and interested. “Brown and Christmas,” Byron says. Still Hightower’s face does not change in expression. “You aint heard that, even,” Byron says. “They lived out there.”
    “Lived out there? They boarded in the house?”
    “No. In a old nigger cabin in the back. Christmas fixed it up three years ago. He’s been living in it ever since, with folks wondering where he slept at night. Then when him and Brown set up together, he took Brown in with him.”
    “Oh,” Hightower said. “But I dont see……. If they were comfortable, and Miss Burden didn’t——”
    “I reckon they got along. They were selling whiskey, using that old place for a headquarters, a blind. I dont reckon she knew that, about the whiskey. Leastways, folks dont know if she ever knew or not. They say that Christmas started it by himself three years ago, just selling to a few regular customers that didn’t even know one another. But when he took Brown in with him, I reckon Brown wantedto spread out. Selling it by the half a pint out of his shirt bosom in any alley and to anybody. Selling what he never drunk, that is. And I reckon the way they got the whiskey they sold would not have stood much looking into. Because about two weeks after Brown quit out at the mill and taken to riding around in that new car for his steady work, he was down town drunk one Saturday night and bragging to a crowd in the barbershop something about him and Christmas in Memphis one night, or on a road close to Memphis. Something about them and that new car hid in the bushes and Christmas with a pistol, and a lot more about a truck and a hundred gallons of something, until Christmas come in quick and walked up to him and jerked him out of the chair. And Christmas saying in that quiet voice of his, that aint pleasant and aint mad either: ‘You ought to be careful about drinking so much of this Jefferson hair tonic. It’s gone to your head. First thing you know you’ll have a hairlip.’ Holding Brown up he was with one hand and slapping his face with the other. They didn’t look like hard licks. But the folks could see the red even through Brown’s whiskers when Christmas’ hand would come away between licks. ‘You come out and get some fresh air,’ Christmas says. ‘You’re keeping these folks from working.’ ” He muses. He speaks again: “And there she was, sitting there on them staves, watching me and me blabbing the whole thing to her, and her watching me. And then she says ‘Did he have a little white scar right here by his mouth?’ ”
    “And Brown is the man,” Hightower says. He sits motionless, watching Byron with a sort of quiet astonishment. There is nothing militant in it, nothing of outraged morality.It is as though he were listening to the doings of people of a different race. “Her husband a bootlegger. Well, well, well.” Yet Byron can see in the other’s face something latent, about to wake, of which Hightower himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him. But Byron thinks that this is just the reflection of what he himself already knows and is about to tell.
    “And so I had already told her before I knew it. And I could have bit my tongue in two, even then, even when I thought that that was all.” He is not looking at the other now. Through the window, faint