“No, ma’am. Not out here.
Not no Lucas Burch out here.
And I know all the folks that work here.
He may work somewhere in town.
Or at another mill.”
“Is there another planing mill?”
“No, ma’am.
There’s some sawmills, a right smart of them, though.”
She watches him.
“They told me back down the road that he worked for the planing mill.”
“I don’t know of any here by that name,” Byron says. “I don’t recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch.”
She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now.
Then she breathes.
It is not a sigh: she just breathes deeply and quietly once.
“Well,” she says.
She half turns and glances about, at the sawn boards, the stacked staves. “I reckon I’ll set down a while.
It’s right tiring, walking over them hard streets from town.
It seems like walking out here from town tired me more than all that way from Alabama did.” She is moving toward a low stack of planks.
“Wait,” Byron says.
He almost springs forward, slipping the sack pad from his shoulder.
The woman arrests herself in the act of sitting and Byron spreads the sack on the planks. “You’ll set easier.”
“Why, you’re right kind.” She sits down.
“I reckon it’ll set a little easier,” Byron says.
He takes from his pocket the silver watch and looks at it; then he too sits, at the other end of the stack of lumber. “I reckon five minutes will be about right.”
“Five minutes to rest?” she says.
“Five minutes from when you come in.
It looks like I done already started resting.
I keep my own time on Saturday evenings,” he says.
”And every time you stop for a minute, you keep a count of it?
How will they know you stopped?
A few minutes wouldn’t make no difference, would it?”
“I reckon I ain’t paid for setting down,” he says. “So you come from Alabama.”
She tells him, in his turn, sitting on the towsack pad, heavybodied, her face quiet and tranquil, and he watching her as quietly; telling him more than she knows that she is telling, as she has been doing now to the strange faces among whom she has travelled for four weeks with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season.
And Byron in his turn gets the picture of a young woman betrayed and deserted and not even aware that she has been deserted, and whose name is not yet Burch.
“No, I don’t reckon I know him,” he says at last. “There ain’t anybody but me out here this evening, anyway.
The rest of them are all out yonder at that fire, more than like.” He shows her the yellow pillar of smoke standing tall and windless above the trees.
“We could see it from the wagon before we got to town,” she says.
“It’s a right big fire.”
“It’s a right big old house.
It’s been there a long time.
Don’t nobody live in it but one lady, by herself. I reckon there are folks in this town will call it a judgment on her, even now.
She is a Yankee.
Her folks come down here in the Reconstruction, to stir up the niggers.
Two of them got killed doing it.
They say she is still mixed up with niggers.
Visits them when they are sick, like they was white.
Won’t have a cook because it would have to be a nigger cook.
Folks say she claims that niggers are the same as white folks. That’s why folks don’t never go out there.
Except one.” She is watching him, listening.
Now he does not look at her, looking a little aside. “Or maybe two, from what I hear.