Light in August Read Online Free PDF

his shirt was soiled but it was a white shirt, and he wore a tie and a stiffbrim straw hat that was quite new, cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face. He did not look like a professional hobo in his professional rags, but there was something definitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home. And that he carried this knowledge with him always as though it were a banner, with a quality ruthless, lonely,and almost proud. “As if,” as the men said later, “he was just down on his luck for a time, and that he didn’t intend to stay down on it and didn’t give a damn much how he rose up.” He was young. And Byron watched him standing there and looking at the men in sweatstained overalls, with a cigarette in one side of his mouth and his face darkly and contemptuously still, drawn down a little on one side because of the smoke. After a while he spat the cigarette without touching his hand to it and turned and went on to the mill office while the men in faded and worksoiled overalls looked at his back with a sort of baffled outrage. “We ought to run him through the planer,” the foreman said. “Maybe that will take that look off his face.”
    They did not know who he was. None of them had ever seen him before. “Except that’s a pretty risky look for a man to wear on his face in public,” one said. “He might forget and use it somewhere where somebody wont like it.” Then they dismissed him, from the talk, anyway. They went back to their work among the whirring and grating belts and shafts. But it was not ten minutes before the mill superintendent entered, with the stranger behind him.
    “Put this man on,” the superintendent said to the foreman. “He says he can handle a scoop, anyhow. You can put him on the sawdust pile.”
    The others had not stopped work, yet there was not a man in the shed who was not again watching the stranger in his soiled city clothes, with his dark, insufferable face and his whole air of cold and quiet contempt. The foreman looked at him, briefly, his gaze as cold as the other’s. “Is he going to do it in them clothes?”
    “That’s his business,” the superintendent said. “I’m not hiring his clothes.”
    “Well, whatever he wears suits me if it suits you and him,” the foreman said. “All right, mister,” he said. “Go down yonder and get a scoop and help them fellows move that sawdust.”
    The newcomer turned without a word. The others watched him go down to the sawdust pile and vanish and reappear with a shovel and go to work. The foreman and the superintendent were talking at the door. They parted and the foreman returned. “His name is Christmas,” he said.
    “His name is what?” one said.
    “Christmas.”
    “Is he a foreigner?”
    “Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?” the foreman said.
    “I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,” the other said.
    And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time. It seemed to him that none of them had looked especially at the stranger until they heard his name. But as soon as they heard it, it was as though there was something in the sound of it that was trying to tell them what to expect; that he carried with him his own inescapable warning, like a flower its scent or a rattlesnake its rattle. Only none of them had sense enough to recognise it. They just thought that he was a foreigner, and as they watched him for the rest of that Friday, working in that tie and the straw hat and the creasedtrousers, they said among themselves that that was the way men in his country worked; though there were others who said, “He’ll change clothes tonight. He wont have on them Sunday clothes when he comes to work in the morning.”
    Saturday morning