Light in August

by William Faulkner

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ he told himself, that same day. ‘I’ll go Sunday,’ he thought. ‘I’ll wait and get this week’s pay, and then I am gone: He began to look forward to Saturday, planning where he would go. He did not see her all that week. He expected her to send for him. When he entered or left the cabin he would find himself avoiding looking toward the house, as he had during the first week he was there. He did not see her at all: Now and then he would see the negro women, in nondescript garments against the autumn chill, coming or going along the worn paths, entering or leaving the house. But that was all. When Saturday came, he did not go. ‘Might as well have all the jack I can get,’ he thought. ‘If she ain’t anxious for me to clear out, no reason why I should be. I’ll go next Saturday.’

  He stayed on. The weather remained cold, bright and cold. When he went to bed now in his cotton blanket, in the draughty cabin, he would think of the bedroom in the house, with its fire, its ample, quilted, lintpadded covers. He was nearer to selfpity than he had ever been. ‘She might at least send me another blanket,’ he thought. So might he have bought one. But he did not. Neither did she. He waited. He waited what he thought was a long time. Then one evening in February he returned home and found a note from her on his cot. It was brief; it was an order almost, directing him to come to the house that night. He was not surprised. He had never yet known a woman who, without another man available, would not come around in time. And he knew now that tomorrow he would go. ‘This must be what I have been waiting for,’ he thought; ‘I have Just been waiting to be vindicated.’ When he changed his clothes, he shaved also. He prepared himself like a bridegroom, unaware of it. He found the table set for him in the kitchen, as usual; during all the time that he had not seen her, that had never failed. He ate and went upstairs. He did not hurry. ‘We got all night,’ he thought. ‘It’ll be something for her to think about tomorrow night and the next one, when she finds that cabin empty. She was sitting before the fire. She did not even turn her head when he entered. “Bring that chair up with you,” she said.

  This was how the third phase began. It puzzled him for a while, even more than the other two. He had expected eagerness, a kind of tacit apology; or lacking that, an acquiescence that wanted only to be wooed. He was prepared to go that length, even. What he found was a stranger who put aside with the calm firmness of a man his hand when at last and in a kind of baffled desperation he went and touched her. “Come on,” he said, “if you have something to tell me. We always talk better afterward. It won’t hurt the kid, if that’s what you have been afraid of.”

  She stayed him with a single word; for the first time he looked at her face: he looked upon a face cold, remote, and fanatic. “Do you realise,” she said, “that you are wasting your life?” And he sat looking at her like a stone, as if he could not believe his own ears.

  It took him some time to comprehend what she meant. She did not look at him at all. She sat looking into the fire, her face cold, still, brooding, talking to him as if he were a stranger, while he listened in outraged amazement. She wanted him to take over all her business affairs—the correspondence and the periodical visits—with the negro schools. She had the plan all elaborated. She recited it to him in detail while he listened in mounting rage and amazement. He was to have complete charge, and she would be his secretary, assistant: they would travel to the schools together, visit in the negro homes together; listening, even with his anger, he knew that the plan was mad. And all the while her calm profile in the peaceful firelight was as grave and tranquil as a portrait in a frame. When he left, he remembered that she had not once mentioned the expected child.

  He did not yet believe that she was mad. He thought that it was because she was pregnant, as he believed that was why she would not let him touch her. He tried to argue with her. But it was like trying to argue with a tree: she did not even rouse herself to deny, she just listened quietly and then talked again in that level, cold tone as if he had never spoken. When he rose at last and went out he did not even know if she was aware that he had gone.

  He saw her but once more within the next two months. He followed his daily routine, save that he did not approach the house at all now, taking his meals downtown again, as when he had first gone to work at the mill. But then, when he first went to work, he would not need to think of her during the day; he hardly ever thought about her. Now he could not help himself. She was in his mind so constantly that it was almost as if he were looking at her, there in the house, patient, waiting, inescapable, crazy. During the first phase it had been as though he were outside a house where snow was on the ground, trying to get into the house; during the second phase he was at the bottom of a pit in the hot wild darkness; now he was in the middle of a plain where there was no house, not even snow, not even wind.

  He began now to be afraid, whose feeling up to now had been bewilderment and perhaps foreboding and fatality. He now had a partner in his whiskey business: a stranger named Brown who had appeared at the mill one day early in the spring, seeking work. He knew that the man was a fool, but at first he thought, ‘At least he will have sense enough to do what I tell him to do. He won’t have to think himself at all’; it was not until later that he said to himself: ‘I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.’ He took Brown because Brown was a stranger and had a certain cheerful and unscrupulous readiness about him, and not overmuch personal courage, knowing that in the hands of a judicious man, a coward within his own limitations can be made fairly useful to anyone except himself.

  His fear was that Brown might learn about the woman in the house and do something irrevocable out of his own unpredictable folly. He was afraid that the woman, since he had avoided her, might take it into her head to come to the cabin some night. He had not seen her but once since February. That was when he sought her to tell her that Brown was coming to live with him in the cabin. It was on Sunday. He called her, and she came out to where he stood on the back porch and listened quietly. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said. He didn’t understand then what she meant. It was not until later that thinking again flashed, complete, like a printed sentence: She thinks that I brought him out here to keep her off. She believes that I think that with him there, she won’t dare come down to the cabin; that she will have to let me alone.

  Thus he put his belief, his fear of what she might do, into his own mind by believing that he had put it into hers. He believed that, since she had thought that, that Brown’s presence would not only not deter her: it would be an incentive for her to come to the cabin. Because of the fact that for over a month now she had done nothing at all, made no move at all, he believed that she might do anything. Now he too lay awake at night. But he was thinking, ‘I have got to do something. There is something that I am going to do.’

  So he would trick and avoid Brown in order to reach the cabin first. He expected each time to find her waiting. When he would reach the cabin and find it empty, he would think in a kind of impotent rage of the urgency, the lying and the haste, and of her alone and idle in the house all day, with nothing to do save to decide whether to betray him at once or, torture him a little longer. By ordinary he would not have minded whether Brown knew about their relations or not. He had nothing in his nature of reticence or of chivalry toward women. It was practical, material. He would have been indifferent if all Jefferson knew he was her lover: it was that he wanted no one to begin to speculate on what his private life out there was because of the hidden whiskey which was netting him thirty or forty-dollars a week. That was one reason. Another reason was vanity. He would have died or murdered rather than have anyone, another man, learn what their relations had now become. That not only had she changed her life completely, but that she was trying to change his too and make of him something between a hermit and a missionary to negroes. He believed that if Brown learned the one, he must inevitably learn the other. So he would reach the cabin at last, after the lying and the hurry, and as he put
his hand on the door, remembering the haste and thinking that in a moment he would find that it had not been necessary at all and yet to neglect which precaution he dared not, he would hate her with a fierce revulsion of dread and impotent rage. Then one evening he opened the door and found the note on the cot.

  He saw it as soon as he entered, lying square and white and profoundly inscrutable against the dark blanket. He did even stop to think that he believed he knew what the message would be, would promise. He felt no eagerness; he felt relief. ‘It’s over now,’ he thought, not yet taking up the folded paper. ‘It will be like it was before now. No more talking about niggers and babies. She has come around. She has worn the other out, seen that she was getting nowhere. She sees now that what she wants, needs, is a man. She wants a man by night; what he does by daylight does not matter. He should have realised then the reason why he had not gone away. He should have seen that he was bound just as tightly by that small square of still undivulging paper as though it were a lock and chain. He did not think of that. He saw only himself once again on the verge of promise and delight. It would be quieter though, now. They would both want it so; besides the whiphand which he would now have. ‘All that foolishness,’ he thought, holding the yet unopened paper in his hands; ‘all that damn foolishness. She is still she and I am still I. And now, after all this damn foolishness’; thinking how they would both laugh over it tonight, later, afterward, when the time for quiet talking and quiet laughing came: at the whole thing, at one another, at themselves.

  He did not open the note at all. He put it away and washed and shaved and changed his clothes, whistling while he did so. He had not finished when Brown came in. “Well, well, well,” Brown said. Christmas said nothing. He was facing the shard of mirror nailed to the wall, knotting his tie. Brown had stopped in the center of the floor: a tall, lean, young man in dirty overalls, with a dark, weakly handsome face and curious eyes. Beside his mouth there was a narrow scar as white as a thread of spittle. After a while Brown said: “Looks like you are going somewhere.”

  “Does it?” Christmas said. He did not look around. He whistled monotonously but truly: something in minor, plaintive and negroid.

  “I reckon I won’t bother to clean up none,” Brown said, “seeing as you are almost ready.”

  Christmas looked back at him. “Ready for what?”

  “Ain’t you going to town?”

  “Did I ever say I was?” Christmas said. He turned back to the glass.

  “Oh,” Brown said. He watched the back of Christmas’s head. “Well, I reckon from that that you’re going on private business.” He watched Christmas. “This here’s a cold night to be laying around on the wet ground without nothing under you but a thin gal.”

  “Ain’t it, though?” Christmas said, whistling, preoccupied and unhurried. He turned and picked up his coat and put it on, Brown still watching him. He went to the door. “See you in the morning,” he said. The door did not close behind him. He knew that Brown was standing in it, looking after him. But he did not attempt to conceal his purpose. He went on toward the house. ‘Let him watch,’ he thought. ‘Let him follow me if he wants to.’

  The table was set for him in the kitchen. Before sitting down he took the unopened note from his pocket and laid it beside his plate. It was not enclosed, not sealed; it sprang open of its own accord, as though inviting him, insisting. But he did not look at it. He began to eat. He ate without haste. He had almost finished when he raised his head suddenly, listening. Then he rose and went to the door through which he had entered, with the noiselessness of a cat, and jerked the door open suddenly. Brown stood just outside, his face leaned to the door, or where the door had been. The light fell upon his face and upon it was an expression of intent and infantile interest which became surprise while Christmas looked at it, then it recovered, falling back a little. Brown’s voice was gleeful though quiet, cautious, conspiratorial, as if he had already established his alliance and sympathy with Christmas, unasked, and without waiting to know what was going on, out of loyalty to his partner or perhaps to abstract man as opposed to all woman. “Well, well, well,” he said. “So this is where you tomcat to every night. Right at our front door, you might say—”

  Without saying a word Christmas struck him. The blow did not fall hard, because Brown was already in innocent and gleeful backmotion, in midsnicker as it were. The blow cut his voice short off; moving, springing backward, he vanished from the fall of light, into the darkness, from which his voice came, still not loud, as if even now he would not jeopardise his partner’s business, but tense now with alarm, astonishment: “Don’t you hit me!” He was the taller of the two: a gangling shape already in a ludicrous diffusion of escape as if he were on the point of clattering to earth in complete disintegration as he stumbled backward before the steady and still silent advance of the other. Again Brown’s voice came, high, full of alarm and spurious threat: “Don’t you hit me!” This time the blow struck his shoulder as he turned. He was running now. He ran for a hundred yards before he slowed, looking back. Then he stopped and turned. “You durn yellowbellied wop,” he said, in a tentative tone, jerking his head immediately, as if his voice had made more noise, sounded louder, than he had intended. There was no sound from the house; the kitchen door was dark again, closed again. He raised his voice a little: “You durn yellowbellied wop! I’ll learn you who you are monkeying with.” There came no sound anywhere. It was chilly. He turned and went back to the cabin, mumbling to himself.

  When Christmas reentered the kitchen he did not even look back at the table on which lay the note which he had not yet read. He went on through the door which led into the house and on to the stairs. He began to mount, not fast. He mounted steadily; he could now see the bedroom door, a crack of light, firelight, beneath it. He went steadily on and put his hand upon the door. Then he opened it and he stopped dead still. She was sitting at a table, beneath the lamp. He saw a figure that he knew, in a severe garment that he knew—a garment that looked as if it had been made for and worn by a careless man. Above it he saw a head with hair just beginning to gray drawn gauntly back to a knot as savage and ugly as a wart on a diseased bough. Then she looked up at him and he saw that she wore steelrimmed spectacles which he had never seen before. He stood in the door, his hand still on the knob, quite motionless. It seemed to him that he could actually hear the words inside him: You should have read that note. You should have read that note thinking, ‘I am going to do something. Going to do something.’

  He was still hearing that while he stood beside the table on which papers were scattered and from which she had not risen, and listened to the calm enormity which her cold, still voice unfolded, his mouth repeating the words after her while he looked down at the scattered and enigmatic papers and documents and thinking fled smooth and idle, wondering what this paper meant and what that paper meant. “To school,” his mouth said.

  “Yes,” she said. “They will take you. Any of them will. On my account. You can choose any one you want among them. We won’t even have to pay.”

  “To school,” his mouth said. “A nigger school. Me.”

  “Yes. Then you can go to Memphis. You can read law in Peebles’s office. He will teach you law. Then you can take charge of all the legal business. All this, all that he does, Peebles does.”

  “And then learn law in the office of a nigger lawyer,” his mouth said.

  “Yes. Then I will turn over all the business to you, all the money. All of it. So that when you need money for yourself you could ... you would know how; lawyers know how to do it so that it ... You would be helping them up out of darkness and none could accuse or blame you even if they found out ... even if you did not replace ... but you could replace the money and none would ever know. ...”

  “But a nigger college, a nigger lawyer,” his voice said, quiet, not even argumentative; just promptive. They were not looking at one another; she had not looked up since he entered.

  “Tell them,” she
said.

  “Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?” She now looked at him. Her face was quite calm. It was the face of an old woman now.

  “Yes. You’ll have to do that. So they won’t charge you anything. On my account.”

  Then it was as if he said suddenly to his mouth: ‘Shut up. Shut up that drivel. Let me talk.’ He leaned down. She did not move. Their faces were not a foot apart: the one cold, dead white, fanatical, mad; the other parchmentcolored, the lip lifted into the shape of a soundless and rigid snarl. He said quietly: “You’re old. I never noticed that before. An old woman. You’ve got gray in your hair.” She struck him, at once, with her flat hand, the rest of her body not moving at all. Her blow made a flat sound; his blow as close upon it as echo. He struck with his fist, then in that long blowing wind he jerked her up from the chair and held her, facing him, motionless, not a flicker upon her still face, while the long wind of knowing rushed down upon him. “You haven’t got any baby,” he said. “You never had one. There is not anything the matter with you except being old. You just got old and it happened to you and now you are not any good anymore. That’s all that’s wrong with you.” He released her and struck her again. She fell huddled onto the bed, looking up at him, and he struck her in the face again and standing over her he spoke to her the words which she had once loved to hear on his tongue, which she used to say that she could taste there, murmurous, obscene, caressing. “That’s all. You’re just worn out. You’re not any good anymore. That’s all.”