“Got rich?” another said.
“One of them did,” Mooney said, still watching Brown. “I saw them yesterday riding in a new car. He”—he jerked his head toward Brown—”was driving it. I wasn’t surprised at that. I am just surprised that even one of them come to work today.”
“Well, I don’t reckon Simms will have any trouble finding a man to fill his shoes in these times,” the other said. “He wouldn’t have any trouble doing that at any time,” Mooney said.
“It looked to me like he was doing pretty well.”
“Oh,” Mooney said. “I see. You are talking about Christmas.”
“Who were you talking about? Has Brown said he is quitting too?”
“You reckon he’s going to stay down there, working, with the other one riding around town all day in that new car?”
“Oh.” The other looked at Brown too. “I wonder where they got that car.”
“I don’t,” Mooney said. “What I wonder is, if Brown is going to quit at noon or work on until six o’clock.”
“Well,” Byron said, “if I could get rich enough out here to buy a new automobile, I’d quit too.”
One or two of the others looked at Byron. They smiled a little. “They never got that rich out here,” one said. Byron looked at him. “I reckon Byron stays out of meanness too much himself to keep up with other folks’,” the other said. They looked at Byron. “Brown is what you might call a public servant. Christmas used to make them come way out to them woods back of Miss Burden’s place, at night; now Brown brings it right into town for them. I hear tell how if you just know the pass word, you can buy a pint of whiskey out of his shirt front in any alley on a Saturday night.”
“What’s the pass word?” another said. “Six bits?”
Byron looked from face to face. “Is that a fact? Is that what they are doing?”
“That’s what Brown is doing. I don’t know about Christmas. I wouldn’t swear to it. But Brown ain’t going to be far away from where Christmas is at. Like to like, as the old folks say.”
“That’s a fact,” another said. “Whether Christmas is in it or not, I reckon we ain’t going to know. He ain’t going to walk around in public with his pants down, like Brown does.”
“He ain’t going to need to,” Mooney said, looking at Brown.
And Mooney was right. They watched Brown until noon, down there at the sawdust pile by himself. Then the whistle blew and they got their lunch pails and squatted in the pump shed and began to eat. Brown came in, glum, his face at once sullen and injured looking, like a child’s, and squatted among them, his hands dangling between his knees. He had no lunch with him today.
“Ain’t you going to eat any dinner?” one said.
“Cold muck out of a dirty lard bucket?” Brown said. “Starting in at daylight and slaving all day like a durn nigger, with a hour off at noon to eat cold muck out of a tin bucket.”
“Well, maybe some folks work like the niggers work where they come from,” Mooney said. “But a nigger wouldn’t last till the noon whistle, working on this job like some white folks work on it.”
But Brown did not seem to hear, to be listening, squatting with his sullen face and his dangling hands. It was as though he were not listening to any save himself, listening to himself: “A fool. A man is a fool that will do it.”
“You are not chained to that scoop,” Mooney said.
“You durn right I ain’t,” Brown said.
Then the whistle blew. They went back to work. They watched Brown down at the sawdust pile. He would dig for a while, then he would begin to slow, moving slower and slower until at last he would be clutching the shovel as though it were a riding whip, and they could see that he was talking to himself. “Because there ain’t nobody else down there for him to tell it to,” one said.
‘It’s not that,” Mooney said. “He hasn’t quite convinced himself yet. He ain’t quite sold yet.”
“Sold on what?”
“On the idea that he’s a bigger fool than even I think he is,” Mooney said.
The next morning he did not appear. “His address from now on will be the barbershop,” one said.
“Or that alley just behind it,” another said.
“I reckon we’ll see him once more,” Mooney said. “He’ll be out here once more to draw his time for yesterday.”
Which he did. About eleven o’clock he came up. He wore now the new suit and the straw hat, and he stopped at the shed and stood there looking at the working men as Christmas had done on that day three years ago, as if somehow the very attitudes of the master’s dead life motivated, unawares to him, the willing muscles of the disciple who had learned too quick and too well. But Brown merely contrived to look scattered and emptily swaggering where the master had looked sullen and quiet and fatal as a snake. “Lay into it, you slaving bastards!” Brown said, in a merry, loud voice cropped with teeth.
Mooney looked at Brown. Then Brown’s teeth didn’t show. “You ain’t calling me that,” Mooney said, “are you?”
Brown’s mobile face performed one of those instantaneous changes which they knew. Like it was so scattered and so lightly built that it wasn’t any trouble for even him to change it, Byron thought. “I wasn’t talking to you,” Brown said.
“Oh, I see.” Mooney’s tone was quite pleasant, easy. “It was these other fellows you were calling a bastard.”
Immediately a second one said: “Were you calling that at me?”
“I was just talking to myself,” Brown said.
“Well, you have told God’s truth for once in your life,” Mooney said. “The half of it, that is. Do you want me to come up there and whisper the other half in your ear?”
And that was the last they saw of him at the mill, though Byron knows and remembers now the new car (with presently a crumpled fender or two) about the town, idle, destinationless, and constant, with Brown lolling behind the wheel and not making a very good job of being dissolute and enviable and idle. Now and then Christmas would be with him, but not often. And it is now no secret what they were doing. It is a byword among young men and even boys that whiskey can be bought from Brown almost on sight, and the town is just waiting for him to get caught, to produce from his raincoat and offer to sell it to an undercover man. They still do not know for certain if Christmas is connected with it, save that no one believes that Brown alone has sense enough to make a profit even from bootlegging, and some of them know that Christmas and Brown both live in a cabin on the Burden place. But even these do not know if Miss Burden knows it or not, and if they did, they would not tell her. She lives in the big house alone, a woman of middleage. She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover of negroes, about whom in the town there is still talk of queer relations with negroes in the town and out of it, despite the fact that it is now sixty years since her grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an exslaveowner over a question of negro votes in a state election. But it still lingers about her and about the place: something dark and outlandish and threatful, even though she is but a woman and but the descendant of them whom the ancestors of the town had reason (or thought that they had) to hate and dread. But it is there: the descendants of both in their relationship to one another ghosts, with between them the phantom of the old spilled blood and the old horror and anger and fear.
If there had been love once, man or woman would have said that Byron Bunch had forgotten her. Or she (meaning love) him, more like—that small man who will not see thirty again, who his spent six days of every week for seven years at the planing mill, feeding boards into the machinery. Saturday afternoons too he spends there, alone now, with the other workmen all down town in their Sunday clothes and neckties, in that terrific and aimless and restive idleness of men who labor.