Light in August Read Online Free PDF Page A

warm. “Why, you’re right kind,” she says.

    The wagon moves slowly, steadily, as if here within the sunny loneliness of the enormous land it were outside of, beyond all time and all haste. From Varner’s store to Jeffersonit is twelve miles. “Will we get there before dinner time?” she says.
    The driver spits. “We mought,” he says.
    Apparently he has never looked at her, not even when she got into the wagon. Apparently she has never looked at him, either. She does not do so now. “I reckon you go to Jefferson a right smart.”
    He says, “Some.” The wagon creaks on. Fields and woods seem to hang in some inescapable middle distance, at once static and fluid, quick, like mirages. Yet the wagon passes them.
    “I reckon you dont know anybody in Jefferson named Lucas Burch.”
    “Burch?”
    “I’m looking to meet him there. He works at the planing mill.”
    “No,” the driver says. “I dont know that I know him. But likely there is a right smart of folks in Jefferson I dont know. Likely he is there.”
    “I’ll declare, I hope so. Travelling is getting right bothersome.”
    The driver does not look at her. “How far have you come, looking for him?”
    “From Alabama. It’s a right fur piece.”
    He does not look at her. His voice is quite casual. “How did your folks come to let you start out, in your shape?”
    “My folks are dead. I live with my brother. I just decided to come on.”
    “I see. He sent you word to come to Jefferson.”
    She does not answer. He can see beneath the sunbonnether calm profile. The wagon goes on, slow, timeless. The red and unhurried miles unroll beneath the steady feet of the mules, beneath the creaking and clanking wheels. The sun stands now high overhead; the shadow of the sunbonnet now falls across her lap. She looks up at the sun. “I reckon it’s time to eat,” she says. He watches from the corner of his eye as she opens the cheese and crackers and the sardines, and offers them.
    “I wouldn’t care for none,” he says.
    “I’d take it kind for you to share.”
    “I wouldn’t care to. You go ahead and eat.”
    She begins to eat. She eats slowly, steadily, sucking the rich sardine oil from her fingers with slow and complete relish. Then she stops, not abruptly, yet with utter completeness, her jaw stilled in midchewing, a bitten cracker in her hand and her face lowered a little and her eyes blank, as if she were listening to something very far away or so near as to be inside her. Her face has drained of color, of its full, hearty blood, and she sits quite still, hearing and feeling the implacable and immemorial earth, but without fear or alarm. ‘It’s twins at least,’ she says to herself, without lip movement, without sound. Then the spasm passes. She eats again. The wagon has not stopped; time has not stopped. The wagon crests the final hill and they see smoke.
    “Jefferson,” the driver says.
    “Well, I’ll declare,” she says. “We are almost there, aint we?”
    It is the man now who does not hear. He is looking ahead, across the valley toward the town on the opposite ridge. Following his pointing whip, she sees two columns ofsmoke: the one the heavy density of burning coal above a tall stack, the other a tall yellow column standing apparently from among a clump of trees some distance beyond the town. “That’s a house burning,” the driver says. “See?”
    But she in turn again does not seem to be listening, to hear. “My, my,” she says; “here I aint been on the road but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already. My, my. A body does get around.”

2
    B yron Bunch knows this: It was one Friday morning three years ago. And the group of men at work in the planer shed looked up, and saw the stranger standing there, watching them. They did not know how long he had been there. He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either. His shoes were dusty and his trousers were soiled too. But they were of decent serge, sharply creased, and