“No,” Byron said. “No.
No.” But he did not move.
“I’ll just do that.
You’ll be gone by that time, I reckon.
I’ll just send a deputy with him.
Will four o’clock do?”
“It’ll be fine.
It’ll be kind of you.
It’ll be a kindness.”
“Sho.
Lots of folks beside me has been good to her since she come to Jefferson.
Well, I ain’t going to say goodbye.
I reckon Jefferson will see you again someday.
Never knowed a man yet to live here a while and then leave it for good.
Except maybe that fellow in the jail yonder.
But he’ll plead guilty, I reckon.
Save his neck.
Take it out of Jefferson though, anyway.
It’s right hard on that old lady that thinks she is his grandmother.
The old man was downtown when I come home, hollering and ranting, calling folks cowards because they wouldn’t take him out of jail right then and there and lynch him.” He began to chuckle, heavily. “He better be careful, or Percy Grimm’ll get him with that army of his.” He sobered. “It’s right hard on her.
On women.” He looked at Byron’s profile. “It’s been right hard on a lot of us.
Well, you come back some day soon.
Maybe Jefferson will treat you better next time.”
At four o’clock that afternoon, hidden, he sees the car come up and stop, and the deputy and the man whom he knew by the name of Brown get out and approach the cabin.
Brown is not handcuffed now, and Byron watches them reach the cabin and sees the deputy push Brown forward and into the door.
Then the door closes behind Brown, and the deputy sits on the step and takes a sack of tobacco from his pocket.
Byron rises to his feet.
‘I can go now,’ he thinks. ‘Now I can go.’
His hiding place is a clump of shrubbery on the lawn where the house once stood.
On the opposite side of the dump, hidden from the cabin and the road both, the mule is tethered.
Lashed behind the worn saddle is a battered yellow suitcase which is not leather.
He mounts the mule and turns it into the road.
He does not look back.
The mild red road goes on beneath the slanting and peaceful afternoon, mounting a hill.
‘Well, I can bear a hill,’ he thinks. ‘I can bear a hill, a man can.’
It is peaceful and still, familiar with seven years.
‘It seems like a man can just about bear anything.
He can even bear what he never done.
He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear.
He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn’t do it.
He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking back won’t do him any good.’
The hill rises, cresting.
He has never seen the sea, and so he thinks.
‘It is like the edge of nothing.
Like once I passed it I would just ride right off into nothing.
Where trees would look like and be called by something else except trees, and men would look like and be called by something else except folks.
And Byron Bunch he wouldn’t even have to be or not be Byron Bunch.
Byron Bunch and his mule not anything with falling fast, until they would take fire like the Reverend Hightower says about them rocks running so fast in space that they take fire and burn up and there ain’t even a cinder to have to hit the ground.’
But then from beyond the hill crest there begins to rise that which he knows is there: the trees which are trees, the terrific and tedious distance which, being moved by blood, he must compass forever and ever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth.
Steadily they rise, not portentous, not threatful.