Light in August by William Faulkner

see you last night, right away. But I never dared to leave her. Them other boarders was passing up and down the hall and I didn’t know when one of them would take a notion to come in and start talking about it and tell the whole thing; I could already hear them talking about it on the porch, and her still watching me with her face all fixed to ask me again about that fire. And so I didn’t dare leave her. And we was setting there in the parlor and she couldn’t hardly keep her eyes open then, and me telling her how I would find him for her all right, only I wanted to come and talk to a preacher I knowed that could help her to get in touch with him. And her setting there with her eyes closed while I was telling her, not knowing that I knew that her and that fellow wasn’t married yet. She thought she had fooled everybody. And she asked me what kind of a man it was that I aimed to tell about her to and I told her and her setting there with her eyes closed so that at last I said ‘You aint heard a word I been saying’ and she kind of roused up, but without opening her eyes, and said ‘Can he still marry folks?’ and I said ‘What? Can he what?’ and she said ‘Is he still enough of a preacher to marry folks?’ ”
    Hightower has not moved. He sits erect behind the desk, his forearms parallel upon the armrests of the chair. He wears neither collar nor coat. His face is at once gaunt and flabby; it is as though there were two faces, one imposed upon the other, looking out from beneath the pale, bald skull surrounded by a fringe of gray hair, from behind the twin motionless glares of his spectacles. That part of his torso visible above the desk is shapeless, almost monstrous, with a soft and sedentary obesity. He sits rigid; on his face now that expression of denial and flight has become definite. “Byron,” he says; “Byron. What is this you are telling me?”
    Byron ceases. He looks quietly at the other, with an expression of commiseration and pity. “I knowed you had not heard yet. I knowed it would be for me to tell you.”
    They look at one another. “What is it I haven’t heard yet?”
    “About Christmas. About yesterday and Christmas. Christmas is part nigger. About him and Brown and yesterday.”
    “Part negro,” Hightower says. His voice sounds light, trivial, like a thistle bloom falling into silence without a sound, without any weight. He does not move. For a moment longer he does not move. Then there seems to come over his whole body, as if its parts were mobile like face features, that shrinking and denial, and Byron sees that the still, flaccid, big face is suddenly slick with sweat. But his voice is light and calm. “What about Christmas and Brown and yesterday?” he says.

    The sound of music from the distant church has long since ceased. Now there is no sound in the room save the steady shrilling of insects and the monotonous sound of Byron’s voice. Beyond the desk Hightower sits erect. Between his parallel and downturned palms and with his lower body concealed by the desk, his attitude is that of an eastern idol.
    “It was yesterday morning. There was a countryman coming to town in a wagon with his family. He was the one that found the fire. No: he was the second one to get there, because he told how there was already one fellow there when he broke down the door. He told about how he come into sight of the house and he said to his wife how it was a right smart of smoke coming out of that kitchen, and about how the wagon come on and then his wife said ‘That house is afire.’ And I reckon maybe he stopped the wagon and they set there in the wagon for a while, looking at the smoke, and I reckon that after a while he said ‘It looks like it is.’ And I reckon it was his wife that made him get down and go and see. ‘They dont know it’s afire’ she said, I reckon. ‘You go up there and tell them’. And he got out of the wagon and went up onto the porch and stood there, hollering