Like she had already thought of that herself, and that she already didn’t believe it before I even said it, and that was all right too.
But the part of her that knew the truth, that I could not have fooled anyway ...” He fumbles, gropes, the unbending man beyond the desk watching him, not offering to help. “It’s like she was in two parts, and one of them knows that he is a scoundrel.
But the other part believes that when a man and a woman are going to have a child, that the Lord will see that they are all together when the right time comes.
Like it was God that looks after women, to protect them from men.
And if the Lord don’t see fit to let them two parts meet and kind of compare, then I ain’t going to do it either.”
“Nonsense,” Hightower says.
He looks across the desk at the other’s still, stubborn, ascetic face: the face of a hermit who has lived for a long time in an empty place where sand blows. “The thing, the only thing, for her to do is to go back to Alabama.
To her people.”
“I reckon not,” Byron says.
He says it immediately, with immediate finality, as if he has been waiting all the while for this to be said. “She won’t need to do that.
I reckon she won’t need to do that.” But he does not look up.
He can feel the other looking at him.
“Does Bu—Brown know that she is in Jefferson?”
For an instant Byron almost smiles.
His lip lifts: a thin movement almost à shadow, without mirth.
“He’s been too busy.
After that thousand dollars.
It’s right funny to watch him.
Like a man that can’t play a tune, blowing a horn right loud, hoping that in a minute it will begin to make music.
Being drug across the square on a handcuff every twelve or fifteen hours, when likely they couldn’t run him away if they was to sick them bloodhounds on him.
He spent Saturday night in jail, still talking about how they were trying to beat him out of his thousand dollars by trying to make out that he helped Christmas do the killing, until at last Buck Conner went up to his cell and told him he would put a gag in his mouth if he didn’t shut up and let the other prisoners sleep.
And he shut up, and Sunday night they went out with the dogs and he raised so much racket that they had to take him out of jail and let him go too.
But the dogs never got started.
And him hollering and cussing the dogs and wanting to beat them because they never struck a trail, telling everybody again how it was him that reported Christmas first and that all he wanted was fair justice, until the sheriff took him aside and talked to him.
They didn’t know what the sheriff said to him.
Maybe he threatened to lock him back up in jail and not let him go with them next time.
Anyway, he calmed down some, and they went on.
They never got back to town until late Monday night.
He was still quiet.
Maybe he was wore out.
He hadn’t slept none in some time, and they said how he was trying to outrun the dogs so that the sheriff finally threatened to handcuff him to a deputy to keep him back so the dogs could smell something beside him.
He needed a shave already when they locked him up Saturday night, and he needed one bad by now.
I reckon he must have looked more like a murderer than even Christmas.
And he was cussing Christmas now, like Christmas had done hid out just for meanness, to spite him and keep him from getting that thousand dollars.
And they brought him back to jail and locked him up that night.
And this morning they went and took him out again and they all went off with the dogs, on a new scent.
Folks said they could hear him hollering and talking until they were clean out of town.”
“And she doesn’t know that, you say.
You say you have kept that from her.
You had rather that she knew him to be a scoundrel than a fool: is that it?”
Byron’s face is still again, not smiling now; it is quite sober.
“I don’t know.
It was last Sunday night, after I came out to talk to you and went back home.
I thought she would be asleep in bed, but she was still sitting up in the parlor, and she said,
‘What is it?
What has happened here?’
And I didn’t look at her and I could feel her looking at me.
I told her it was a nigger killed a white woman.
I didn’t lie then.
I reckon I was so glad I never had to lie then.