His hand trembles, despite the urgency he feels a lassitude so that he must drive himself.
The razor is dull; he tries to whet it upon the side of one brogan, but the leather is ironhard and wet with dew. He shaves, after a fashion.
His hand trembles; it is not a very good job, and he cuts himself three or four times, stanching the blood with the cold water until it stops.
He puts the shaving tools away and begins to walk.
He follows a straight line, disregarding the easier walking of the ridges.
After a short distance he comes out upon a road and sits down beside it. It is a quiet road, appearing and vanishing quietly, the pale dust marked only by narrow and infrequent wheels and by the hooves of horses and mules and now and then by the print of human feet. He sits beside it, coatless, the once white shirt and the once creased trousers muddy and stained, his gaunt face blotched with patches of stubble and with dried blood, shaking slowly with weariness and cold as the sun rises and warms him. After a time two negro children appear around the curve, approaching.
They do not see him until he speaks; they halt, dead, looking at him with whiterolling eyes.
“What day of the week is it?” he repeats.
They say nothing at all, staring at him.
He moves his head a little.
“Go on,” he says.
They go on.
He does not watch them. He sits, apparently musing upon the place where they had stood, as though to him they had in moving merely walked out of two shells.
He does not see that they are running.
Then, sitting there, the sun warming him slowly, he goes to sleep without knowing it, because the next thing of which he is conscious is a terrific clatter of jangling and rattling wood and metal and trotting hooves.
He opens his eyes in time to see the wagon whirl slewing around the curve beyond and so out of sight, its occupants looking back at him over their shoulders, the whiphand of the driver rising and falling.
‘They recognised me too,’ he thinks. ‘Them, and that white woman.
And the negroes where I ate that day.
Any of them could have captured me, if that’s what they want.
Since that’s what they all want: for me to be captured.
But they all run first.
They all want me to be captured, and then when I come up ready to say Here I am Yes I would say Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs they all run away.
Like there is a rule to catch me by, and to capture me that way would not be like the rule says.’
So he moves back into the bushes.
This time he is alert and he hears the wagon before it comes into sight.
He does not show himself until the wagon is abreast of him.
Then he steps forth and says,
“Hey.”
The wagon stops, jerked up.
The negro driver’s head jerks also; into his face also comes the astonishment, then the recognition and the terror.
“What day is this?” Christmas says.
The negro glares at him, slackjawed.
“W-what you say?”
“What day of the week is this?
Thursday?
Friday?
What?
What day?
I am not going to hurt you.”
“It’s Friday,” the negro says. “O Lawd God, it’s Friday.”
“Friday,” Christmas says.
Again he jerks his head. “Get on.”
The whip falls, the mules surge forward.
This wagon too whirls from sight at a dead run, the whip rising and falling.
But Christmas has already turned and entered the woods again.
Again his direction is straight as a surveyor’s line, disregarding hill and valley and bog.
Yet he is not hurrying.
He is like a man who knows where he is and where he wants to go and how much time to the exact minute he has to get there in.
It is as though he desires to see his native earth in all its phases for the first or the last time.
He had grown to manhood in the country, where like the unswimming sailor his physical shape and his thought had been molded by its compulsions without his learning anything about its actual shape and feel.