Possibly no one would ever have known if it had not been for the other stranger, Brown.
But as soon as Brown told, there were a dozen men who admitted having bought whiskey from Christmas for over two years, meeting him at night and alone in the woods behind an old colonial plantation house two miles from town, in which a middle-aged spinster named Burden lived alone.
But even the ones who bought the whiskey did not know that Christmas was actually living in a tumble down negro cabin on Miss Burden’s place, and that he had been living in it for more than two years.
Then one day about six months ago another stranger appeared at the mill as Christmas had done, seeking work.
He was young too, tall, already in overalls which looked as though he had been in them constantly for some time, and he looked as though he had been travelling light also.
He had an alert, weakly handsome face with a small white scar beside the mouth that looked as if it had been contemplated a great deal in the mirror, and a way of jerking his head quickly and glancing over his shoulder like a mule does in front of an automobile in the road, Byron thought.
But it was not alone backwatching, alarm; it seemed also to Byron to possess a quality of assurance, brass, as though the man were reiterating and insisting all the while that he was afraid of nothing that might or could approach him from behind.
And when Mooney, the foreman, saw the new hand, Byron believed that he and Mooney had the same thought.
Mooney said: “Well, Simms is safe from hiring anything at all when he put that fellow on.
He never even hired a whole pair of pants.”
“That’s so,” Byron said. “He puts me in mind of one of these cars running along the street with a radio in it.
You can’t make out what it is saying and the car ain’t going anywhere in particular and when you look at it close you see that there ain’t even anybody in it.”
“Yes,” Mooney said. “He puts me in mind of a horse.
Not a mean horse.
Just a worthless horse.
Looks fine in the pasture, but it’s always do always got a sore hoof when hitchingup time comes.”
“But I reckon maybe the mares like him,” Byron said.
“Sho,” Mooney said. “I don’t reckon he’d do even a mare any permanent harm.”
The new hand went to work down in the sawdust pile with Christmas.
With a lot of motion to it, telling everybody who he was and where he had been, in a tone and manner that was the essence of the man himself, that carried within itself its own confounding and mendacity.
So that a man put no more belief in what he said that he had done than in what he said his name was, Byron thought.
There was no reason why his name should not have been Brown.
It was that, looking at him, a man would know that at some time in his life he would reach some crisis in his own foolishness when he would change his name, and that he would think of Brown to change it to with a kind of gleeful exultation, as though the name had never been invented.
The thing was, there was no reason why he should have had or have needed any name at all.
Nobody cared, just as Byron believed that no one (wearing pants, anyway) cared where he came from nor where he went nor how long he stayed.
Because wherever he came from and wherever he had been, a man knew that he was just living on the country, like a locust.
It was as though he had been doing it for so long now that all of him had become scattered and diffused and now there was nothing left but the transparent and weightless shell blown oblivious and without destination upon whatever wind.
He worked some, though, after a fashion.
Byron believed that there was not even enough left of him to do a good, shrewd job of shirking.
To desire to shirk, even, since a man must be better than common to do a good job of malingering, the same as a good job at anything else: of stealing and murdering even.
He must be aiming at some specific and definite goal, working toward it.
And he believed that Brown was not.
They heard how he went and lost his entire first week’s pay in a crap game on the first Saturday night.
Byron said to Mooney:
“I am surprised at that.
I would have thought that maybe shooting dice would be the one thing he could do.”
“Him?” Mooney said. “What makes you think that he could be good at any kind of devilment when he ain’t any good at anything as easy as shovelling sawdust? that he could fool anybody with anything as hard to handle as a pair of dice, when he can’t with anything as easy to handle as a scoop?”
Then he said, “Well, I reckon there ain’t any man so sorry he can’t beat somebody doing something.
Because he can at least beat that Christmas doing nothing at all.”
“Sho,” Byron said, “I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.”
“I reckon he’d be bad fast enough,” Mooney said, “if he just had somebody to show him how.”
“Well, he’ll find that fellow somewhere, sooner or later,” Byron said. They both turned and looked down at the sawdust pile, where Brown and Christmas labored, the one with that brooding and savage steadiness, the other with a higharmed and erratic motion which could not have been fooling even itself.
“I reckon so,” Mooney said. “But if I aimed to be bad, I’d sho hate to have him for my partner.”
Like Christmas, Brown came to work in the same clothes which he wore on the street.
But unlike Christmas, he made no change in his costume for some time.
“He’ll win just enough in that crap game some Saturday night to buy a new suit and still have fifty cents in nickels to rattle in his pocket,” Mooney said. “And on the next Monday morning we ain’t going to see him again.”
Meanwhile Brown continued to come to work in the same overalls and shirt in which he had arrived in Jefferson, losing his week’s pay in the Saturday night dice game or perhaps winning a little, greeting either the one or the other with the same shouts of imbecile laughter, joking and chaffing with the very men who in all likelihood were periodically robbing him.
Then one day they heard that he had won sixty dollars.
“Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him,” one said.
“I don’t know,” Mooney said. “Sixty dollars is the wrong figure.