Something that Christmas didn’t want told, anyway, and that even Brown would have had better sense than to told if he hadn’t been drunk.
That’s what I heard.
I wasn’t there, myself.” When he raises his face now he finds that he has looked down again before he even met her eyes.
He seems to have already a foreknowledge of something now irrevocable, not to be recalled, who had believed that out here at the mill alone on Saturday afternoon he would be where the chance to do hurt or harm could not have found him.
“What does he look like?” she says.
“Christmas?
Why—”
“I don’t mean Christmas.”
“Oh. Brown.
Yes.
Tall, young.
Dark complected; womenfolks calls him handsome, a right smart do, I hear tell.
A big hand for laughing and frolicking and playing jokes on folks.
But I ...” His voice ceases.
He cannot look at her, feeling her steady, sober gaze upon his face.
“Joe Brown,” she says. “Has he got a little white scar right here by his mouth?”
And he cannot look at her, and he sits there on the stacked lumber when it is too late, and he could have bitten his tongue in two. Chapter 3
FROM his study window he can see the street.
It is not far away, since the lawn is not deep.
It is a small lawn, containing a half dozen lowgrowing maples.
The house, the brown, unpainted and unobtrusive bungalow is small too and by bushing crape myrtle and syringa and Althea almost hidden save for that gap through which from the study window he watches the street.
So hidden it is that the light from the corner street lamp scarcely touches it.
From the window he can also see the sign, which he calls his monument.
It is planted in the corner of the yard, low, facing the street.
It is three feet long and, eighteen inches high—a neat oblong presenting its face to who passes and its back to him.
But he does not need to read it because he made the sign with hammer and saw, neatly, and he painted the legend which it bears, neatly too, tediously, when he realised that he would have to begin to have to have money for bread and fire and clothing.
When he quitted the seminary he had a small income inherited from his father, which, as soon as he got his church, he forwarded promptly on receipt of the quarterly checks to an institution for delinquent girls in Memphis.
Then he lost his church, he lost the Church, and the bitterest thing which he believed that he had ever faced—more bitter even than the bereavement and the shame—was the letter which he wrote them to say that from now on he could send them but half the sum which he had previously sent.
So he continued to send them half of a revenue which in its entirety would little more than have kept him.
“Luckily, there are things which I can do,” he said at the time.
Hence the sign, carpentered neatly by himself and by himself lettered, with bits of broken glass contrived cunningly into the paint, so that at night, when the corner street lamp shone upon it, the letters glittered with an effect as of Christmas:
REV. GAIL HIGHTOWER, D.D.
Art Lessons
Hand-painted Xmas Anniversary Cards
Photographs Developed
But that was years ago, and he had had no art pupils and few enough Christmas cards and photograph plates, and the paint and the shattered glass had weathered out of the fading letters.
They were still readable, however; though, like Hightower himself, few of the townspeople needed to read them anymore.
But now and then a negro nursemaid with her white charges would loiter there and spell them aloud with that vacuous idiocy of her idle and illiterate kind, or a stranger happening along the quiet and remote and unpaved and little-used street would pause and read the sign and then look up at the small, brown, almost concealed house, and pass on; now and then the stranger would mention the sign to some acquaintance in the town.
“Oh, yes,” the friend would say. “Hightower.
He lives there by himself.
He come here as minister of the Presbyterian church, but his wife went bad on him.
She would slip off to Memphis now and then and have a good time.
About twenty-five years ago, that was, right after he come here.
Some folks claimed he knew about it.
That he couldn’t or wouldn’t satisfy her himself and that he knew what she was doing.
Then one Saturday night she got killed, in a house or something in Memphis.
Papers full of it.
He had to resign from the church, but he wouldn’t leave Jefferson, for some reason.
They tried to get him to, for his own sake as well as the town’s, the church’s.
That was pretty bad on the church, you see.