The wagon has not stopped; time has not stopped.
The wagon crests the final hill and they see smoke.
“Jefferson,” the driver says.
“Well, I’ll declare,” she says. “We are almost there, ain’t we?”
It is the man now who does not hear.
He is looking ahead, across the valley toward the town on the opposite ridge.
Following his pointing whip, she sees two columns of smoke: the one the heavy density of burning coal above a tall stack, the other a tall yellow column standing apparently from among a clump of trees some distance beyond the town.
“That’s a house burning,” the driver says. “See?”
But she in turn again does not seem to be listening, to hear.
“My, my,” she says; “here I ain’t been on the road but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already.
My, my.
A body does get around.” Chapter 2
BYRON BUNCH knows this: It was one Friday morning three years ago.
And the group of men at work in the planer shed looked up, and saw the stranger standing there, watching them.
They did not know how long he had been there.
He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either.
His shoes were dusty and his trousers were soiled too.
But they were of decent serge, sharply creased, and his shirt was soiled but it was a white shirt, and he wore a tie and a stiffbrim straw hat that was quite new, cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face.
He did not look like a professional hobo in his professional rags, but there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home.
And that he carried his knowledge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruthless, lonely, and almost proud.
“As if,” as the men said later, “he was just down on his luck for a time, and that he didn’t intend to stay down on it and didn’t give a damn much how he rose up.”
He was young.
And Byron watched him standing there and looking at the men in sweatstained overalls, with a cigarette in one side of his mouth and his face darkly and contemptuously still, drawn down a little on one side because of the smoke.
After a while he spat the cigarette without touching his hand to it and turned and went on to the mill office while the men in faded and worksoiled overalls looked at his back with a sort of baffled outrage.
“We ought to run him through the planer,” the foreman said. “Maybe that will take that look off his face.”
They did not know who he was.
None of them had ever seen him before.
“Except that’s a pretty risky look for a man to wear on his face in public,” one said: “He might forget and use it somewhere where somebody won’t like it.”
Then they dismissed him, from the talk, anyway.
They went back to their work among the whirring and grating belts and shafts.
But it was not ten minutes before the mill superintendent entered, with the stranger behind him.
“Put this man on,” the superintendent said to the foreman. “He says he can handle a scoop, anyhow.
You can put him on the sawdust pile.”
The others had not stopped work, yet there was not a man in the shed who was not again watching the stranger in his soiled city clothes, with his dark, insufferable face and his whole air of cold and quiet contempt.
The foreman looked at him, briefly, his gaze as cold as the other’s.
“Is he going to do it in them clothes?”
“That’s his business,” the superintendent said. “I’m not hiring his clothes.”
“Well, whatever he wears suits me if it suits you and him,” the foreman said. “All right, mister,” he said.
“Go down yonder and get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust.”
The newcomer turned without a word.
The others watched him go down to the sawdust pile and vanish and reappear with a shovel and go to work.
The foreman and the superintendent were talking at the door.
They parted and the foreman returned.
“His name is Christmas,” he said.
“His name is what?” one said.
“Christmas.”
“Is he a foreigner?”
“Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?” the foreman said.
“I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,” the other said.
And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.